Word: yoshida
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After Premier Shigeru Yoshida's fourth cabinet was overthrown by a revolt within his own party (TiME, March 23), his exultant opponents predicted that the long reign of "the Fox" was at last over. But Japan's voters, who went to the polls this week, proved that their 74-year-old Premier is far from politically dead. In Japan's second election in its first year of full independence, Yoshida's conservative, pro-American Liberal Party won 199 of the 466 seats in the Lower Chamber of the Diet. Yoshida did not get an absolute majority...
...form a new coalition, Yoshida may have to welcome back some of the errant Hatoyamaites or make a deal with the rightist Progressive Party of peg-legged Mamoru Shigemitsu. Yoshida will need all the cooperation he can get from the right, because the left is getting stronger at every election. This week 138 Socialists and one Communist were elected. A year ago there were only 46 Socialists in the Lower Chamber...
...Insult. Fortnight ago their chance came. Yoshida was under attack in the press for following a foreign policy "subservient" to that of the U.S. Socialists accused him of rearming Japan before Japan can afford rearmament; rightists warned that he is not rearming Japan fast enough to meet the Communist threat. (Hatoyama favors direct rearmament, wants to remove the disarmament pledge which MacArthur put into the Japanese constitution; Yoshida prefers the subterfuge of a national police force...
...Diet, all opposition parties ganged up on Yoshida's plan to take Japan's police and school systems out of the hands of local government, where the U.S. occupation placed them, and set them under the national government. The Yoshida program, they said, was a reversion to "evils of the past." Needled by opposition, delays, Yoshida lost his temper, called an opposition member an idiot. In the excessively polite Japanese language, this was an insult indeed. Though he hastily apologized, the opposition pressed home a vote of censure, followed it up with the nonconfidence motion. Yoshida thereupon dissolved...
Possible Coalition. Yoshida boasts that his party will win a greater majority in the new elections than they got in October. But with Hatoyama and his dissident Liberals running on a splinter ticket, Yoshida may get beaten. The opposition is scattered, but might unite in a coalition headed by Hatoyama or by one-legged Mamoru Shigemitsu, the Progressive Party leader, who, as Foreign Minister, signed Japan's surrender aboard the Missouri, and was convicted as a war criminal...