Books in Brief

The Press in Japan Today—A Case Study, by Edward P. Whittemore (University of South Carolina Press, $2.50). With a combined daily circulation of 19 million out of a total of 37 million newspapers sold throughout the country, Japan’s Tokyo-based “Big Three” national papers (the Ashai, the Mainichi and the Yomiuri) enjoy an influence perhaps unrivalled anywhere in the Free World. Yet during the wild leftist rioting against the U.S.-Japanese defense treaty in May and June, 1960, the three were so offended by then Premier Kishi’s ramrodding of Parliament and neglect of the traditional Japanese face-saving gambit of “adjusting” differences, that they attacked him more vigorously than the chanting snake-dancers who had caused Japan’s deepest crisis of democratic procedure. As this interesting monograph (the first publication of the University of South Carolina’s Institute of International Studies) makes abundantly clear, democracy in Japan is still a heated question of definitions. At the height of the rioting, for example, a young girl complained tearfully to a Western newsman that Kishi, in barring demonstrators from the Diet building, had been grossly “undemocratic.” Asked what she and her comrades would do if admitted, she replied brightly: “Why, we’d burn it down, of course.”

R. WHALEN

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The Press in Japan Today—A Case Study, by Edward P. Whittemore (University of South Carolina Press, $2.50). With a combined daily circulation of 19 million out of a total of 37 million newspapers sold throughout the country, Japan’s Tokyo-based “Big Three” national papers (the Ashai, the Mainichi and the Yomiuri) enjoy an influence perhaps unrivalled anywhere in the Free World. Yet during the wild leftist rioting against the U.S.-Japanese defense treaty in May and June, 1960, the three were so offended by then Premier Kishi’s ramrodding of Parliament and neglect of the traditional Japanese face-saving gambit of “adjusting” differences, that they attacked him more vigorously than the chanting snake-dancers who had caused Japan’s deepest crisis of democratic procedure. As this interesting monograph (the first publication of the University of South Carolina’s Institute of International Studies) makes abundantly clear, democracy in Japan is still a heated question of definitions. At the height of the rioting, for example, a young girl complained tearfully to a Western newsman that Kishi, in barring demonstrators from the Diet building, had been grossly “undemocratic.” Asked what she and her comrades would do if admitted, she replied brightly: “Why, we’d burn it down, of course.”

R. WHALEN