Sundered Socialists

In the manner of Socialists everywhere these days, Japan's out-of-power Socialists spend as much time and energy fighting one another as they do fighting the opposition. Right-wing Japanese Socialists dream of a "responsible" Socialist Party along the lines of the British Labor Party; left-wingers prefer brawls to ballots, and take their cues from the Communist-lining leaders of Japan's biggest labor federation, the 3,500,000-man Sohyo.

Last week the party came apart. Accusing the left-wingers of being "proCommunist and anti-American while pretending to be neutralist," Right-Wing Leader Sue-hiro Nishio took 30 Socialist Diet members with him and set up a new "Democratic Socialist Party." Nishio is a coldly aloof onetime foundry foreman who organized one of Japan's first labor unions. He made it clear that his new party would have no time for "the proletarian revolution" and class war, would attempt to offer Japan's growing middle class as well as its laborers a non-Marxist alternative to the conservatism of Prime Minister Nobosuke Kishi.

Nishio's walkout will probably make it easier for Kishi to push through the Diet the revised security treaty that U.S. and Japanese diplomats are curently negotiating, and that Premier Kishi hopes to sign on a forthcoming visit to the U.S.

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