DARK RUMBLINGS BENEATH A PRISTINE NEW YEAR

FOR AMERICANS, NEW Year's Day 1959 brought the unaccustomed shock of revolution, not on their own soil, yet too close for comfort: Fidel Castro's seizure of power in Cuba. The arrival of communism in the Western Hemisphere, barely 150km from the Florida coastline, hit the US like a tsunami, the npples of which could be felt on our side of the Pacific. We did not know it then, but it was an event that in a few years’ time would lead the world to the brink of nuclear war.

In Japan, too, there were the stirrings of ideological excess and upheaval. There was perhaps no acute danger of a seismic shift in the power structure, but the potential for violent actions by zealots from the left and right always seemed to glower just below the country's stable and orderly surface. Perhaps because Japan's democratic roots were shallow, Japanese society seemed vulnerable to the allure of a totalitarian system. The extreme left looked to Communist China for its Utopian model and structured its strategy along subversive lines. The far right betrayed their nostalgia for Japan's lost glory by openly advocating full rearmament and even a return to imperial rule.

Ever since the savage battle in 1952 between police and left-wing demonstrators (mostly students) on the Imperial Palace plaza in Tokyo, there had been recurring instances of mostly Communist-inspired disturbances, formally aimed against the Secunty Treaty with the US, but more generally intended to fuel anti-American and anti-establishment sentiment.

Anti-American feeling had reached a peak in the spring of 1954 when a Japanese fishing vessel was exposed to radioactive ash from the American hydrogen bomb test on Bikini in the South Pacific. The 23 fishermen were found to be suffering from serious radiation sickness and one of them died. I well remember the panic that gapped the country in the wake of the ‘Bikini Incident’. Although the vessel's catch of tuna was destroyed it was feared the explosion had set off a chain reaction rendering all fish unfit for consumption.