Word: diets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Anti-American? In the biggest of last week's Tokyo demonstrations, some 60,000 youngsters shouted, waved banners and threw stones outside the Diet build ing. The Premier was trapped for eight hours before he could slip out a back way. But most participants seemed to have only the vaguest idea of what they were protesting.-"The pact opens the path to fascism." explained one demonstrator vaguely. Girls shouting "Yankee go home" were shocked at the very suggestion that they were anti-American. Americans watching the demonstrations were never molested, and one "angry" crowd politely waited while a flustered...
Mystifying to Westerners, this phrase means to Japanese that the duly elected majority party in the Diet has passed a measure by outvoting the opposition. A more proper approach, they say, is for the majority party to water down its proposals until the opposition accepts it. Few Japanese seem to understand that such a procedure stultifies rather than promotes the processes of parliamentary democracy...
...Kishi had done was to abruptly force a vote on the treaty at a late session of the Diet. It had been under debate for 107 days, and Kishi commanded a clear majority. The Socialists, knowing they would be outvoted, boycotted the session and even barred the Speaker's way into the chamber until police arrived. But last week it was Kishi who was under attack in the press and in intellectual circles as the "destroyer of democracy in Japan...
...Next day Asanuma showed up on TV to cry for the Premier's resignation. At his side sat Nobusuke Kishi, coldly angry. "Why should I dissolve the Diet and hold elections because of a small minority demonstrating in the streets of Tokyo?" he declared. "There have been three elections since I became Premier, and my government has won a majority in all of them. Therefore, I believe I have a mandate from the people...
...many true democrats, reminded of the prewar strong-arm groups that made a mockery of prewar parliamentary rule, were deeply alarmed by the trend of events. In the Diet, the opposition benches were still empty-boycotted by Socialist members who were now streaming home to whip their constituents into greater resistance to Kishi. Ugly days had passed and more could come...