Japan's 'Strange' Party

...At the beginning of 1962, the trend over the preceding year and a half gave hope that the Socialists might indeed be moving in the direction of neutralism...

...Structural reform was downgraded from "strategy" to "tactics" and thereby labelled a temporary expedient, a device for bringing revolution a step nearer...

...At least four things—from the Western point of view, none of them happy—can be said of the party today: 1. It has become increasingly isolated from the international Socialist movement, which refuses to accept the notion of "a Socialist bloc" led by Moscow...

...But in an interview with a visiting delegation of Japanese Socialists on January 12, Mao remarked: "The Socialist Party of Japan is a very strange sort of party...

...that the United States is making use of revived Japanese and German imperialism to stir up trouble in Europe and Asia...

...Tensions between the two world blocs, he said, were "without doubt" the result of "war policies based on the fundamental structure of imperialism, and particularly American imperialism...

...It is impossible to reconcile their present espousal of "the Socialist bloc" with their own 1955 platform, which says: "Communism in fact tramples upon democracy, denies the freedom, dignity and individuality of man, and is incompatible with Socialism based on democracy...

...They said they were too neutralist...

...The Chang-Suzuki statement, for instance, is remarkably similar to a statement issued in Peking last summer by a visiting delegation of Japanese Communists...

...The Socialist party of Japan would therefore seem to be on record in favor of neutralism for Japan but not for Yugoslavia...

...The party did very badly in Diet elections that year, and there was reason for believing that the Asanuma statement was responsible...

...Eda was facing a stiff fight for re-election as Secretary General...

...It will take persuasion not from Boston, but from within Japan—perhaps from the trade unions (which are on the whole as doctrinaire as the Socialists) and from the electorate as well—to change the Japanese Socialist party...

...The second blow came a week later at the party convention...

...Its chief proponent, Eda, is a man without strong convictions, and there was a temptation to consider the program as nothing more than a pleasant, meaningless phrase which he had used to stay on top of his faction-ridden party...

...I would go even further to say that I think Chairman Mao and I may have similar reasons for considering the party strange...

...Perhaps now that the fractional squabbling has subsided a bit, the trend toward neutralism so happily detected in 1961 can be allowed to proceed...

...Socialist leaders seemed to give the new moderation much of the credit for the victory...

...Had it remained strategy, it would have been but an expedient in any case...

...THE JAPANESE SOCIALIST PARTY SEEMS TOO HOPELESS TO BE TRUE' Japan's 'Strange' Party By Edward Seidensticker Tokyo Chairman Mao Tse-tung is not a person with whom I often find myself in agreement...

...Edward Seidensticker, translator of several Japanese novels, has reported from Tokyo for over a decade...

...The following year was of course the time of the violent reaction against the Security Treaty with the U.S., one of the by-products of which was Asanuma's assassination...

...4. The Socialists are faced with an increasingly painful "internal contradiction" of the sort they love to find in decadent capitalism...

...Early in 1961 this became party policy...

...Unfortunately, the Japanese Socialist party cannot be laughed off...

...2. By the same token, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the Japanese Socialist party from the Communist party...

...Before the elections they had embarked upon a major change in policy...

...The new operating policy seemed intent upon assuring us that the Socialist party borrows its fundamental categories from Moscow and Peking...

...The party did very well in the elections of November 1960, virtually demolishing the Democratic Socialist party, which had broken away from the Socialists a year before and adopted a platform very similar to that of the German Social Democratic party...

...Nowhere in the document was the expression "positive neutralism" used, despite the fact that the Socialists claim it as their basic policy...

...While this came as a surprise, it could still be explained in terms of factional differences within the party...

...The Japanese Socialists call themselves "positive neutralists" and dislike alliances—or, as will be seen, some alliances more than others...

...It seemed likely that he was maneuvering to pull a few votes from that group, knowing that he could already count on the support of the more moderate factions...

...I could not agree more...

...It is the only major opposition party in Japan and, should the conservatives ever lose power, it is the party that will presumably take it...

...It was deleted, the delegation explained, out of deference to the Chinese, who associate neutralism with the Yugoslavs...

...The Socialists, to soothe and seduce the electorate, had to cast about for something else...

...There is evidence that they are quite aware of the fact...

...This declared that "American imperialism is the source of world tensions...

...After all, it is silly to talk of individual reforms and at the same time to say that nothing of importance can be accomplished until there is a revolution...

...Oddly, one never quite loses hope for the Socialist party of Japan, for when it is at its worst it seems too hopeless to be true...

...The trend started to develop shortly after March 1959, when the late Inejiro Asanuma, then Chairman of the Socialist party, announced in Peking that "American imperialism" was "the common enemy of China and Japan...

...Eda was re-elected, but the party's "operating policy" (as distinguished from the basic platform, which has not been revised since 1955) was again modified, this time in the direction of Marxism...

...The optimistic view of structural reform and Socialist aims was dealt something of a blow late in 1961 when Eda reported to the party's Central Committee on the year's political activities...

...In the 1959 split, the Democratic Socialists walked off with the ideology of "the new Socialism...

...He can take the blame if things go badly this summer...

...Faced with elections again at the end of 1960, the Socialists seemed to be doing their best both to squirm out from under Asanuma's Peking statement and to combat the public image of the party as violently antiAmerican...

...Yet the possibility existed that it would be more than that...

...They insisted that they wanted to be friends with both the United States and the Soviet Union, and promised to send a friendship delegation to the United States—a promise that was never kept...

...And they long ago gave up the idea that everything must precede anything—that revolution must precede any significant reform...

...The challenge was from the far Left of the party...

...Structural reform offered the possibility of going to the electorate with something specific...

...A Socialist delegation called American policy imperialist...

...3. Intimacy with the Communists and hostility towards "decadent, imperialistic, monopolistic" capitalism is not going to do the Socialists any good with the electorate, and they face elections again this summer...

...It was therefore possible to see structural reform as a way of obliquely denying Marxism, which does not serve the Socialists well during elections...

...No one really understands it...

...A striking feature of the recent convention was the reluctance of important Socialists to take over the chairmanship of the Election Policies Committee...

...Structural reform is an elusive, ill-defined concept, deriving, curiously enough, from Palmiro Togliatti and the Italian Communist party...

...Probably it does not understand itself...

...Attorney General Robert Kennedy came to Japan in February, apparently convinced that he could have the same persuasive effect on Japan that he once had on the Wyoming delegation...

...Still, for the final word on the Japanese Socialist party, one must defer to Mao: it is indeed "a very strange sort of party...

...The post finally went to an obscure person from the far Left...

...With pride in their eyes and voices, I have had Japanese Socialists tell me that theirs is the one Socialist party that has Communists among its members...

...In October a program known as "structural reform" had been gingerly introduced by the party's Secretary General, Saburo Eda...

...Early this year, however, two considerably more severe blows were aimed at the optimistic view...

...and that "the Kennedy Administration is suppressing democratic movements among the American people...

...Much has been said recently about Eda's re-election signifying the emergence of a more reasonable generation...

...Kennedy said that Socialist "neutralism" was not really neutralism at all but a pro-Communist fraud...

...While other Socialist parties may have reservations about American policy, they nonetheless find the notion of "American imperialism" as the source of world tensions ludicrous...

...On January 13, Mosaburo Suzuki, chairman of the delegation that met Mao, issued a joint statement with Chang Hsi-jo, chairman of the Chinese People's Foreign Policy Association...

...but the mere fact of allowing it a longer life would have been comforting to those who hoped that the Socialist party, by its own devious ways, might be trying to deny Marxism...

...The Socialist party of Japan is probably unique among Socialist parties of advanced countries in its benign attitude toward Communists, and in its willingness to accept and fight for the Communist view of the world...

...He said he was not an imperialist...

...It went against the insular clannishness of the Japanese to have an important politician join a foreign government in an attack on the fundamental foreign policy of his own nation...

...And that was that, for half an hour...