Strains on the Japanese Left

...This year, however, has seen a sharpening of the dispute over the question whether the Gensuikyo's propaganda is to be directed against all nuclear weapons and tests, or is to be concentrated against the Western powers...

...The effect of this unseemly squabbling appears to have been to discredit the formerly influential Gensuikyo in the eyes of liberal Japanese opinion...

...Such a development would be likely to produce a crisis in Japan's international relations because Japan has no bipartisan foreign policy...

...The controversy has been complicated by the conflict within the Japanese Communist party between pro-Russian and pro-Chinese factions, which came to a head over the Moscow test-ban treaty...

...The opening of the Congress was delayed while supporters of the rival factions fought for the central position in front of the war memorial...

...When at last the formal proceedings began, open insults were exchanged between the Russian and Chinese delegates...

...whereas the Russians and their supporters in Japan hailed it as a victory for the Soviet Union's struggle for peace, the Chinese denounced it as a fraud and a Soviet capitulation to American imperialism...

...Japan's remarkable economic progress over the last decade has been the principal factor in staving off revolutionary agitation, whether of the extreme Left or the extreme Right: The country has been too busy and prosperous for the forces of discontent to attract any wide popular support...

...And whatever the political trend of the near future, it seems that the intense emotional aversion of the Japanese people to nuclear weaponry will continue to be an exploitable factor...

...It was the majority or "mainstream" faction which took the initiative in 1960 in the mass demonstrations against the Kishi Government and its new Security Pact with America, which resulted in President Eisenhower's having to cancel his intended visit to Japan...

...nuclear arms as instruments of imperialism, but declare the same arms in the hands of Russia to be a bulwark of peace...

...The disintegration, though, has not enabled the Communist party to regain control...

...the Socialists are committed to neutralism and the termination of the American alliance...

...But in 1958 the Communist party lost control of Zengakuren to "Trotskyites," who regarded the official party leadership as too moderate and unenterprising, and henceforth the party had to be content with directing a minority faction within Zengakuren...

...Until the summer of this year the two parties have been able to maintain a common front on the bomb in spite of their differences of approach, and have cooperated in the Gensuikyo, the Japanese Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, which has sponsored an annual international conference at Hiroshima...

...And because it was the Americans who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and because Japan since its recovery of sovereignty has had a treaty of alliance with the United States, the Hiroshima symbol can be exploited also for a specifically anti-American agitation...

...it was first captured by stalwarts of Zengakuren, the Leftwing national students' union, and riot police had to be called in to remove them...

...G. F. Hudson is Director of the Center for Far Eastern Studies at St...

...They can only put this across, if at all, by intensifying the anti-American propaganda campaign and making America exclusively responsible for developing nuclear weapons...

...But this party, now held together by the capable leadership of Ikeda, is rent by factions, and its disintegration might bring the Socialists to power, either with an electoral majority or in coalition with one of the Liberal Democratic factions...

...Because it is the symbol of war, it has become a focus for all the pacifist and semipacifist sentiments of contemporary Japan...

...its faction, the Heimingakuren, is opposed by all the other groups...

...Professor Yasui, the founder of the movement, strove in vain to hold his organization together by submitting compromise resolutions...

...The Chinese, who will soon have to carry out tests in order to make themselves into a nuclear power, are in a difficult position in relation to peace campaigns...

...Thus, last month it brought together the whole Japanese Left on an anti-nuclear platform—the Socialists, who are against Japanese rearmament and the Security Pact with America, but hold that all nuclear weapons are wicked whoever it is who possesses them...

...There is nevertheless an undercurrent of dissatisfaction which could become formidable if the Japanese economy were to suffer a serious setback...

...The inhabitants of Hiroshima itself, who regard the anniversary primarily as an occasion for mourning their dead, were indignant at the visitors' brawls in their Park of Peace...

...The Liberal Democratic party at present maintains its hold on power, preserving an economic system of free capitalist enterprise and, in foreign policy, the alliance with America...

...and the Communists, who denounce U.S...

...Before 1958 the Japanese Communist party controlled the Zengakuren—a body of considerable political importance because of the multiplication of universities in Japan after the War, the iconoclasm of the younger generation with childhood memories of the defeat and occupation of their country, and the capacity of young Japanese for disciplined mass demonstration...

...Finally the Socialists broke away altogether, leaving the field to the Communists, but the Communists themselves were now openly split, and the opening of the Congress was marked by scenes of ideological antagonism, and even of violence, particularly inappropriate to an occasion supposed to be devoted to commemorating war victims and preaching peace among nations...

...It does not follow, however, that the offense given to moderately minded people means that the extreme Left is ceasing to be a significant factor in Japanese politics...

...It also has become a world center of pacifism, a place almost of religious pilgrimage as well as of the traffic of tourists who go there to see the shadows of the dead imprinted on stone by the explosion at the moment of their incineration...

...In that situation the militant extremist groups, now politically insignificant, might play an important role...

...Inevitably, the place which stirs such emotions has become involved in the politics of the bomb and of the cold war...

...Antony's College, Oxford...

...Since the Japanese economy remains dependent to a considerable degree on American support, which would presumably not be forthcoming for a neutralist Japan, a Japanese government of the Left would soon get into difficulties, which would open the way either to reaction or to a regime of more radical and even revolutionary color, with overtones of defiant nationalism...

...Since then the "mainstream" faction has in turn split up into rival groups, so that Zengakuren is no longer a compact organization with a coherent policy...

...the leader of the Chinese delegation gave his Russian colleague a Hitler salute and violently attacked the test-ban treaty in his opening speech, to which the Russians replied by turning their backs...

...they can continue to urge that all nuclear weapons be abolished, but meanwhile they have to claim a right to hold nuclear tests after America and Russia have agreed to stop them...

...A feature of Japanese Leftwing politics over the last five years has been the decline of the Communist party hold on youth...

...On the contrary, recent events seem to indicate a new militancy of the revolutionary element among youth...

...The trend is toward a militant revolutionary socialism of a special Japanese type, with a strong pacifist emphasis which does not exclude domestic violence, professing adherence to Marxism, but recalcitrant to any direction from abroad, and in so far as it is responsive to foreign influence, more sympathetic to China than to Russia...

...Paradoxically, China gains from the Japanese attitude as against both America and Russia as long as it has no nuclear weapons, but will join the company of the damned as soon as it acquires a nuclear capability...

...LETTER FROM HIROSHIMA Strains on the Japanese Left By G. F Hudson Hiroshima The Japanese nation has the distinction of being the only one actually to suffer the effects of that warfare with nuclear weapons whose mere possibility is the nightmare of others...

...The Japanese have thus come to have a special awareness of the nuclear menace to mankind, which, although an apprehension shared by the world in general and thus a factor linking Japan with other countries, has also given them a sense of unique expertise and even a certain sombre pride, like that sometimes shown by people who suffer from very rare diseases...

...By a curious coincidence it has also been the only nation to suffer casualties directly from the fallout of a nuclear test: Nine years after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Japanese trawler 80 miles from an American hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific was enveloped in a cloud of radioactive dust carried by the wind from the site of the explosion...

...A prolonged factional struggle for control of the Gensuikyo had not resolved the conflicts over policy by the time the delegates from abroad assembled in Hiroshima for the Ninth World Congress Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs...

...And because of the threat to mankind inherent in the unprecedented power of destruction which nuclear weapons represent, Hiroshima has become a symbol, both for the Japanese and for people all over the world, of the horror of war special to our generation...