TIME

June 24, 1966 12:00 AM GMT-4

The Japanese housewife used to be a timid, tittering soul who knelt obediently at her husband’s feet and spoke only when spoken to. But the women have now organized, and they can be a formidable power. This became painfully clear to the government last week when Miss Tsuruko Haruno, vice president of the Housewives Association of Japan, glared through her bifocals and charged that the Japanese family was about to be taken to the cleaners.

The ladies had a point. In the past three years, one of the few bright spots in Japan’s inflation-ridden economy has been the cost of dry cleaning, and the thanks are due to some 1,500 enterprising operators who installed automatic dry-cleaning equipment and cut prices almost in half (from 970 to 560 for a man’s suit). Now, charged the redoubtable Miss Haruno, the traditional dry-cleaning establishments—through their organization, the National Federation of Cleaning and Environmental Sanitation Associations—were trying to lobby the upstarts out of business. The Japanese Diet, in fact, was about to pass a special bill that would require automated shops to adopt a variety of expensive “sanitation” measures, and hire unneeded engineering technicians to watch the operation of the machines.

The bill never got through. The housewives’ campaign was quickly taken up by the Tokyo press, and soon block headlines and black editorials were condemning the dry cleaners’ lobby. The furor hit Premier Eisaku Sato, whose popularity keeps dropping as prices keep rising, where it hurt most. Worried about the latest opinion polls, which showed that only 28.8% of the Japanese public supports him, Sato warned his party leaders to “proceed slowly” on the bill—which in his language meant drop it. Economic Planner Aiichiro Fujiyama chimed in to say that it should be “studied further”—which in his language meant drop it immediately. The bill was quietly dropped.

Euphoric, Miss Haruno promptly set off on a victory tour of shops using automatic dry-cleaning equipment. “Listen to those machines,” she crowed. “They sound like the three cheers of banzai.”

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