Demonstrations In Tokyo

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24882, 23 May 1946, Page 4

Demonstrations In Tokyo

For the second time within a week, demonstrators have entered the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to demand “food and “ improved political leadership ” A “ Daily Telegraph ” correspondent’s account of Japan’s food problem throws some light on these episodes. For the food problem, as he assessed it a month ago, was largely one of the Government’s own making. To illustrate, he quoted a remark made to him some weeks earlier by Shigeru Yoshida, then Foreign Minister and now Prime Minister. “ I would give “ everything I possess ”, said Yoshida, “to see one bale of rice “standing on a wharf, with hun- “ dreds of’ Japanese looking at it. “Then they would know at least “ that we had done something for “ them, and it 'would be a start in “restoring their confidence in us “and in future governments”. Yet Yoshida and others of the Cabinet who talked in this vein had not tried to find a means of increasing Japan’s food supply. Instead, they looked to the occupation authorities to do it for them, or at least to tell them what to do and how to do it—an attitude reflected in the prefectural authorities throughout the country. To get anything done, General MacArthur’s headquarters had continually to push and prod the Japanese authorities. “To the “ Japanese people, General Mac- “ Arthur is the answer to everything”. But the day was then in sight, the correspondent suggested, when General MacArthur could no longer be the answer to everything. American forces in Japan were being so rapidly demobilised, he wrote, that- there were already not enough men to stand behind the Japanese, goading them into action; and he asked: "Will the “ elections that have now given the "Japanese a new Diet, which in its “ turn may give them a new “ Cabinet, prove to be also the “beginning of a new sense of responsibility for the well-being of ‘ the country?” It is early to find an answer. But the first signs are not assuring. The Cabinet formed by Mr Yoshida is said to be heavily Conservative; and the food situation, which the “ Daily Tele- “ graph’s ” correspondent saw as Japan’s greatest problem, is, on the evidence that Mr Hoover offered a few days ago, alarming. It may, too, be a disturbing development

' that some tens of thousands in 'Tokyo have shown their dependence on the Emperor. The demons strations inside the palace grounds are the first of the kind reported from Tokyo; and those who made up the second and greater band may well have thought that it was not the Government but the Emperor who, in Mr Yoshida’s words, “had done something for them”. A respected Imperial institution can be a factor in reviving and strengthening democratic tendencies in Japan. It has, also, been the chief instrument in • putting them down.