Marxism's "Sonic Boom"

"We respect Karl Marx for setting out the basic lines of socialism," says Kenji Miyamoto, chief of Japan's Communist Party. "But this does not mean that we are absolved from using our own brains in adapting Marx's tenets to the realities of modern Japan." Miyamoto is understating the case. Japan's Communist Party has not only adapted to the realities of a democratic country but has also forced the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to adapt itself to the unpleasant reality of a strong Communist opposition.

Although they have less than 10% of the seats in the Diet's all-powerful lower house, the Communists have nonetheless managed to stall or stymie the government of Premier Kakuei Tanaka on several major issues. Through street demonstrations and a boycott of parliament, which the other opposition parties joined, they forced Tanaka to drop a redistricting reform bill that would have virtually ensured the Liberal Democrats a permanent majority in parliament. They also played a major role in the political maneuvering that led to the embarrassing cancellation of Emperor Hirohito's planned state visit to the U.S. If Tanaka is forced by circumstance to resign as Premier before the completion of his three-year term, chances are that the Communists will be held chiefly responsible.

The Communist surge--one Tokyo daily calls it a "sonic boom"--is as sudden as it is startling. When Tanaka, supposedly at the peak of his popularity, called an election last fall, he discovered that the chief gainer was not his own Liberal Democratic Party but the Communists, who raised their representation in the Diet's 491-seat lower chamber from 14 to 39 (with another guaranteed vote from a left-wing ally). With a party membership of only 300,000, the Communists had attracted 5,500,000 votes, 10.5% of all ballots cast. Gains in local elections have been even more striking; roughly one-third of the population, mostly in the big cities, is governed by Communist-backed mayors and assemblymen. Although the union-backed Socialist Party, with 118 seats, is the largest opposition party in the Diet, the Communists have taken over the intellectual leadership of the antigovernment forces.

The Communists' success has been a long time in preparation. Ruthlessly suppressed after its founding in 1922, the party re-emerged after World War II with a commitment to peaceful democratic evolution. Thanks largely to this low-profile platform, it gained 35 seats in the 1949 elections. The Korean War brought new East-West tensions, however. Reversing course under pressure from Moscow, the Communists adopted a more militant stance that earned them the image of a "Molotov cocktail party." U.S. occupation authorities banned many Communist leaders from political life, and the 1952 elections left the party with no seats at all in the Diet.

In 1958, reformers, led by Miyamoto and Sanzo Nosaka, the Communists' grand old man, gained control. Aided by two brilliant brothers, Koichiro Ueda, now the editor of the party paper Akahata, and Tetsuzo Fuwa, now the secretary general, Miyamoto and Nosaka outlined a policy that would stress grassroots issues and make plain party independence from foreign influence. Almost alone among the world's Communists, the Japanese party feuds with both the Russians and the Chinese. Among other matters, Tokyo's Reds have quarreled with Moscow's direction of the international Communist movement and with Peking's refusal to join with the Russians in a common front to help the Indochinese Communists.

The party's attention to the problems of the dissatisfied, unrepresented little man has paid off handsomely. For ten years, the women of a Kyoto suburb fought vainly for a water system that would end their long walks to wells or the polluted Oseki River. Only when the Communists took up their cause did the local government come up with the money. In Tokyo the Communists have fought against high-rise projects that would block sunlight to small householders and have helped to provide a 24-hour, free medical clinic. Even in the countryside, which is still dominated by the Liberal Democrats, the Communists are gaining by resisting big corporations that speculate in land and by fighting the "threat" of farm imports.

Some political analysts believe that the Communists are approaching the peak of their power, and that many people who voted for them last year were simply protesting the business-oriented policies of the Liberal Democratic Party. For the moment, anyway, a Communist majority in Japan seems unthinkable. Earlier this month, in fact, the rival Socialists rebuffed a Communist proposal to start talks for a popular-front coalition. Still, the real question is whether Tanaka's party will take the voters' warning to heart and carry out the social reforms that would make a Communist majority truly impossible.

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