For President Kennedy the year 1963 would begin the same way 1962 had ended-- with his administration trying to contain the twin dangers of all- out global nuclear war and JPR expansionism in the Pacific. Unfortunately, the Murigami regime was doing its best to undermine him on both counts. In speech after speech Murigami repeatedly asserted Japan's right to build as many nuclear weapons as its industrial complex could muster along with the Japanese government's willingness to use these weapons as a last resort if it could not defend its interests by any other means. Murigami took great pride in Japan's massive and ever-growing nuclear arsenal; anytime when a mobile missile launcher passed his reviewing stand during the annual Tokyo parade marking the anniversary of the April Revolution, Murigami could be counted on without fail to applaud enthusiastically and salute the men on the launcher trucks(who more often than not returned the salute with true and unabashed exuberance).

So it was thoroughly in character for him when he declared in his 1963 Liberation Day speech to the Japanese Diet that Japan would not only keep building atomic weapons, it would make every effort to speed up its plans to become the world's dominant nuclear power. This, of course, didn't sit well with any of the other major world powers-- least of all Russia, whose Far Eastern cities and industrial plants were all potentially right in the line of fire of a Japanese missile strike. Nikita Khrushchev, unwilling to let his country be a sitting duck for a potential Japanese nuclear attack, wasted little time in issuing a directive to his defense ministry to find ways of forestalling such an attack while simultaneously developing more efficient ways of delivering a counterstrike on Japan if Russia did come under attack. One of the earliest results of this directive was that the Russian Federal Navy embarked upon its most ambitious peacetime expansion program in decades-- a program aimed at doubling the size of its already gigantic missile submarine fleet and sharpening the striking power of its surface forces.

Concurrent with this the Russian Federal Air Force commenced its own sweeping modernization program, the centerpiece of which was a long- term overhaul of its strategic bomber force. By the spring of 1965, when Leonid Brezhnev was into his first term as Russian premier, one-third of the air force's long-range bomber fleet had been replaced as hundreds of older aircraft-- some of which were old enough to have seen action in the Second World War --gave way to a new generation of high-speed jets which could hit strategic targets in Japan on a moment's notice. The deadliest of these jet bombers, particularly from the view of Japanese air defense commanders, was the Tupolev Tu-23 Hedgehog, a swept-wing four engine jet that could deliver nuclear payloads to Tokyo directly from Russian soil. Brezhnev boasted that the Tu-23 could "take off at breakfast and be home from its mission before lunch", and many foreign military observers who'd seen the Hedgehog on its test runs were inclined to agree with him.

For a short time Japan's quarrel with the other great powers of the world on the nuclear disarmament issue moved to the back burner as other events, like Martin Luther King's civil rights demonstrations in the U.S. and the China-Vietnam border crisis in Asia, seized the world's attenion. But in October of 1965 the nuclear issue would return to center stage with a vengeance thanks to the test detonation of the most powerful atomic bomb exploded to date. Officially designated Prototype No. 274-A3 and nicknamed "the Hell Bomb", it was detonated 500 miles off Honshu's eastern coast and registered a blast force of sixty megatons; according to declassified U.S. intelligence reports about the Hell Bomb test, the roar from the explosion was loud enough to be picked up on the sonar equipment of U.S. and Russian submarines as far as 120 miles from the test site.



While the Murigami regime was playing its nuclear game of chicken on the global stage, it was unknowingly but steadily lurching toward disaster on the home front. Political dissatisfaction was simmering just underneath the surface of the unified facade the regime sought to present to the rest of the world; this was particularly true of many younger Japanese who were becoming increasingly resentful of the stranglehold the elderly men of the regime had on their lives. The domestic economy was at best dysfunctional, with many state-owned companies being in such horrible financial condition that if they had been private businesses they would have long since had to declare bankruptcy.

Japan's agricultural industry, such as it was, was mismanaged to the point where food shortages were an almost daily event and Japan had to go so far as to secretly import some foodstuffs from its old foe China by way of a third-party arrangement with Sweden, one of the few nations on Earth who had managed to stay on cordial terms with both Tokyo and Beijing. The extent to which the Liberation Society had wrecked Japan's farm system was spelled out by a 60-page memo the CIA drafted for President Lyndon Johnson in February of 1966; it aptly described the Murigami government's policies on food and agriculture, and its domestic policy as a whole, as "a modern- day Greek tragedy being played out with an entire nation as its stage." In the starkest of terms the memo described Japan under the Murigami regime as a Dickensian chamber of horrors, held together mostly by force and on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. At least one senior White House aide went so far as to call it "hell come to Earth in the Pacific". Many ordinary Japanese would have agreed with him on that score; at least one out of every five Japanese citizens between the ages of 12 and 60 died of starvation between the years 1965 and 1967, and the gross inefficiency of Japan's food distribution system only served to exacerbate this tragedy.

Then there was Japan's automotive industry, which had developed a worldwide reputation for turning out vehicles whose safety was, at best, open to question. While Tokyo's official propaganda trumpted the boastful claim that Japanese cars were miles ahead of their American and Europrean counterparts in terms of quality, anybody who'd had the misfortunte to get behind the wheel of one for more than five seconds could have easily shot those claims to pieces; in truth, vehicles produced by government-run car manufacturing firms in Japan had a nasty tendency to fall apart should one keep them out on the road too long-- and that was assuming one was able to get them on the road in the first place. More often than not, they tended to stall at the worst possible times; to keep them going for a reasonable length of time took an insanely high amount of maintenance, so much so the average Japanese citizen could only afford to drive two hours out of every day.

And even relatively well-off Japanese would find themselves facing great hardship when, in the spring of 1968, a devaluation of the yen led to the most severe wave of inflation any country had experienced since the hyperinflaton crisis plaguing Germany in the early 1920s. The Tokyo stock exchange went into freefall; Japan's state-owned banks had to temporarily close most of their branches to forestall a run on their assets by panic- stricken account holders. Most of the little export business which Japan did with the rest of the world dried up seemingly overnight, clearing the way for her economic and political rivals to increase their own shares of the global market. Workers' strikes, a phenomenon not seen in Japan since the end of the April Revolution, began breaking out across the country as dissatisfied laborers grew restless about their inadequate(or, in at least some cases, nonexistent) pay.

Not surprisingly the government was severely displeased by this turn of events and expressed its displeasure by sending troops to tamp down the strikers. Though some of the strikes broke up in the face of such shows of force, many other strikers defied the regime and kept marching up and down the picket lines demanding better salaries and improved working conditions as well as an expansion of civil rights for Japanese citizens. But for one or two twists of fate, their protests might have ended Liberation Society rule right then and there; as it was they offered a convenient pretext for Murigami's adversaries within the society itself to remove him from office and install a less harsh figure as chancellor.

The protests continued into the late summer and early autumn of 1969, at which time students from some of Japan's largest universities joined in the demonstrations. The entire country teetered on the brink of revolution and some Western foreign affairs scholars even predicted the imminent fall of the Liberation Society regime. Deciding that swift action was needed in order to save the Society from total collapse, the senior chairman of the party's executive committee convened a special closed-door meeting of that committee in September of 1969 to vote on a resolution which, if approved, would effectively end Murigami's tenure as chancellor....

comments powered by Disqus