Word: shidehara
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Japan's imitative ability last week turned to politics. Emperor Hirohito and his Shidehara Cabinet, with General MacArthur's enthusiastic endorsement, offered the Japanese 16 closely typed pages of a new Constitution which forswears armies and war, guarantees civil rights, deprives the peerage of its privileges, promises the people an end of police tyranny. Now, with complete responsibility placed squarely on the Cabinet, and the Cabinet made fully answerable to the Diet, Japan would have a form of government more sensitive to democratic pressures...
Premier Kijuro Shidehara, flat on his back with bronchitis, tried hard to prop up his wobbly Cabinet. He accepted the resignations of five ministers on the Allied blacklist, but instead of replacing them with ambitious Liberals or Social Democrats, he chose veteran conservatives and bureaucrats. While the press groaned with dissatisfaction, Shidehara announced that he would carry on until parliamentary elections in "late March or early April...
Premier Kijuro Shidehara was abed with a cold, but he was not as sick as his Government. MacArthur's order covered a majority of Shidehara's colleagues, and sent them scurrying to the Premier's bedside for counsel. Foreign Minister Shigeru Yoshida was assigned to ask the Allied Commander for clarification. Should the Cabinet resign en masse, merely eliminate its undesirables, or stay on as exempt...
MacArthur's purge of officialdom stirred most Japanese more than Hirohito's scuttling of his divinity. The new parties and the press, consistently more liberal than the Government, gleefully belabored Shidehara's "do-nothing" administration. Cried Tokyo's influential Yomiuri Hochi: "The pursuit of those responsible for the war will soon be made by the people themselves ... up to the Emperor himself if they continue to cling to their positions without any thought of repentance...
...unreconstructed militarists justify Japanese aggression to themselves can only be guessed - they are damn care ful right now to keep their mouths shut. At the opposite extreme the ardent peace advocates (like Kagawa) of course feel that the militarists are guilty. The great majority of Japs, including Premier Shidehara, believe in peace as a policy. But they still re gard Japan as the aggrieved party in the events leading up to the China war. They are not conscious of having adopted a national policy of aggres sion. Insofar as that policy existed, "some bad men were responsible." The idea that...