The gradual erosion of the conservative vote continued, but meanwhile several things happened to undermine the opposition and give the LDP a continuing hold on the government. One was the rift in the Communist world in 1959 between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, which threw the Japanese leftists into ideological disarray. The split, which had become obvious by the early sixties, embarrassed the Socialists and put great strains on the Communists, who swung back and forth between Moscow and Peking and ended up alienated from both. China’s 1962 attack on India, a country considered admirable in leftist circles for its outspoken neutralism, caused further embarrassment, and China’s development and testing of nuclear weapons from 1964 on proved even more divisive. Chinese nuclear fallout was brought over Japan by the prevailing winds; American nuclear tests had never had this result. Even before this, the whole antibomb movement, which had been an important “united front” activity in the fifties, had fallen apart. The Democratic Socialists deserted the annual August 6 ceremonies in Hiroshima, forming their own movement in 1961, and two years later the Socialist party, which felt that the Communist nuclear powers as well as the United States must be condemned, broke off from the Communists and founded a bitterly competing movement. The ultimate solution to this awkward situation was to let the annual ceremonies lose their domestic political coloration and become a generalized, popular antinuclear movement.
In the first years after Mao Tse-tung’s triumph in China in 1949, it had seemed to many Japanese that the Chinese Communists might be charting a better road into the future than the one to which the American occupation had helped steer Japan. But by the early sixties, it had become clear that China’s Great Leap Forward had been an economic disaster. The confusion caused by the Cultural Revolution in 1965 and the disorders of the Red Guards, which started in the late summer of 1966, were followed by a second economic decline that further weakened the image of the People’s Republic as a world leader. With Red Guards reminding the Japanese of the excesses of their own “young officers” in the thirties and with Japanese living standards soaring more than ten times higher than those of China, it took a very doctrinaire person indeed to see the Chinese as providing a useful model for Japan.
An even more serious blow to the long-nurtured hope of the Socialists to replace the LDP as the majority party was the proliferation of opposition parties in the 1960s and the corresponding decline in the Socialists’ share of the progressive vote. As mentioned previously, the greater part of the Socialist right wing, supported by the Domei unions (then known as Zenro), broke away in January 1960 to form the Democratic Socialist party. Its 8.7 percent of the popular vote in the election of November 1960 cut heavily into the support for the Socialists. The new party was deeply committed to parliamentary democracy, and the division between it and the more Marxist left wing of the party was to prove unsurmountable.
The remaining Socialists were further weakened by the serious ideological divisions that existed among them. Although the party retained the strong support of Sohyo, the largest of the labor federations, its leaders were becoming old and out of touch with changing conditions in Japan and the world. Although Japan was clearly dependent on trade with the United States and its allies, the Socialists remained wedded to a dream of close association with China and the Soviet Union, which had little foreign trade and were feuding bitterly with each other. The Socialists talked an anachronistic language of class struggle to an increasingly affluent population, which regarded itself as middle class. The doctrinaire leadership would swing the party to the left at party conventions, but candidates for election would have to swing back toward the center when they approached the voters. Bitter struggles for power developed among the left wing, the part of the right wing that had remained in the party, and a centrist group. In 1962 Eda Saburo of the right wing put forth his “vision” of the Socialist objectives as a combination of American prosperity, the Soviet Union’s thoroughgoing social security system, British parliamentary democracy, and Japan’s own “peace constitution,” but such a formulation of ideals was, of course, anathema to the Left. A seesaw battle for party control continued through the sixties and into the seventies between politicians who, while wearing the same socialist label, championed essentially irreconcilable points of view.
Meanwhile, another opposition party was growing, the only clearly new party in postwar Japanese politics. This was the Komeito (sometimes called the Clean Government party in English). It was an outgrowth of a new religious movement, the Soka Gakkai, meaning the Value Creating Association. Theologically an offshoot of Nichiren Buddhism, Soka Gakkai has been the most successful of the so-called new religions since the war. These new religions have been an important phenomenon in Japan for more than a century, but none of the earlier ones had as great success as Soka Gakkai, which quickly built up an ardent following of several million people. Its appeal, as with many of the other new religions, appears to be less religious than social. It seems to have been able to answer the need for a sense of group identity among many of the less educated and financially less successful residents of Japanese cities who, lacking the old village roots or membership in such large groupings as great industrial enterprises or labor unions, felt isolated in society. Soka Gakkai’s simple doctrines of absolute faith and immediate worldly benefits are hardly distinctive in Japan, though its militant proselytizing techniques, which recall Nichiren’s own intransigence in the thirteenth century, are unique. Its real reasons for success, however, probably lie in its firm leaders and their superb skills at organization and showmanship. Since Soka Gakkai membership is overwhelmingly urban and from the lower end of the economic scale, which is just where one would expect much of the Socialist vote to be concentrated, this development of a rival party was another blow to Socialist hopes. In fact, ever since the election of 1969 the Komeito has won close to 10 percent of the electorate and the Socialists only around 20 percent or less.
The Soka Gakkai ventured into the political fray only cautiously at first, and its actual political views long remained vague. Being opposed to the ruling LDP, it has tended to phrase its stand on international questions in terms borrowed from the Left. But behind this rhetoric the leaders of Soka Gakkai and Komeito appear to be essentially old-fashioned and conservative Japanese, more representative of the lower middle class than of radical intellectuals or militant labor groups. The Soka Gakkai first ran candidates for local election in 1955 and for the House of Councillors the next year, winning six seats then, fifteen in 1962, and twenty in 1965. In 1964 it organized the Komeito party as its political wing, and the new party won 5.4 percent of the popular vote in 1967 and 11 percent in 1969.
Another factor in the splitting up of the opposition vote was that the Sino-Soviet rift, instead of damaging the fortunes of the Japanese Communist party, benefited it by allowing the party to cast off subservience to foreign Communist movements and to stress its own independence and nationalism. The Japanese Communists broke with the Soviet Union in 1964 and with China in 1966. Tightly organized and well supported both financially and ideologically by a successful newspaper, Akahata, or “Red Flag,” the Communist party rose to new heights of popularity under the strong leadership of Miyamoto Kenji, who had been chosen party chairman in 1958. It restored its popular vote to 4 percent in the election of November 1963, received almost 7 percent in December 1969, and earned 10.5 percent in December 1972. Like the Komeito, its chief source of strength lay in what had become a large urban protest vote, which preferred these fresher, more tightly organized parties to the Socialists for expressing their opposition to the ruling LDP.
The restoration of the Communists to a significant role, the appearance of Komeito, and the defection of the DSP all cut drastically into Socialist prospects. The opposition was now split four ways, and the Socialist vote was beginning to erode even more rapidly than that of the LDP. With a relatively old and ideologically inflexible leadership, it was hard to create a
fresh image and attract new voters. Between 1958 and 1972 its share of the popular vote for the lower house fell 11 percent, compared to 9 percent for the LDP, proportionately a much greater loss for the Socialists in view of their smaller size. With voting strength down to only a fifth of the total, Socialist hopes of replacing the LDP as the majority party faded away.
Against a badly split opposition, the LDP became relatively stronger. When Ikeda was forced to resign in November 1964, Sato Eisaku, the blood brother of Kishi (whose name had been changed by his adoption into another family), became the new prime minister and managed to hold on to the post for over seven and a half years, the longest tenure in Japanese history. In place of a real two-party system, Japan had evolved what people came to call a “one and a half party system,” with the LDP an apparently permanent majority, facing a divided and frustrated opposition. Sato’s relationship with Kishi and the fact that his own faction was, next only to Kishi’s, on the extreme right did not help his image with the public and he was never as popular as Ikeda, but the first years of his administration went quite smoothly.
In general, Sato continued Ikeda’s policies. In 1965 he managed to bring to completion, after a decade of difficult negotiations, the “normalization” agreement with Korea. This was the last of the major reparation settlements and set the stage for rapid economic growth in South Korea, a tremendous surge in trade between the two countries, and large economic investments there by Japan. Sato also continued Ikeda’s efforts to expand Japan’s role in the rest of East Asia. It became the dominant trading partner of many Asian countries and an important provider of economic aid through reparations, small supplementary grants, and commercial investments, which greatly expanded Japanese exports. When the Asian Development Bank was set up in 1966, Japan equaled America’s contribution of $200 million to its capital, the first time since the war that any country had matched the United States in a major undertaking of this sort. Trainees in Japan from other Asian countries passed the 1,000 mark annually, and Japan started a small “peace corps” type of operation, with over 300 volunteers in certain South Asian and African countries.
Sato held the first general elections under his leadership on January 29, 1967. This election showed that the LDP vote was continuing to erode, as was to be expected because of the declining numbers of farmers and the soaring of urban populations. Another factor, however, was a series of minor political scandals, dubbed the “black mists” of corruption by the opposition. This was the first time since its formation that the LDP failed to get a majority of the popular vote, winning less than 49 percent, as compared to almost 55 percent in 1963. However, because of the division of the opposition into four parties, the number of seats won by the LDP in the lower house continued to be a solid majority.
In the next two elections, in December 1969 and December 1972, five months after Sato had resigned, the percentage of popular votes for the LDP fell only slightly, and since the party could usually count on ten or more independents joining its ranks, its percentage of lower house seats remained at over 55. The conservative independents who regularly joined the party after each election were mostly rising younger politicians who, having failed to receive the party’s nomination, still had the confidence to run against the designated candidates of the party and had won. With their aid, the LDP’s control over the Diet remained quite firm.
The opposition parties became increasingly frustrated over their inability to win as much support among the younger voters as they had hoped to. They attributed this to the “my home-ism” of the younger generation, using these English words to describe the younger people’s greater interest in their own personal lives and happiness than in the great social and political issues of the day.
Domestically Japan had become an extraordinarily stable country, exuding self-confidence, satisfaction, and optimism in its economy, its society, its culture, and to some extent even in its political life. But clouds were gathering outside of Japan. The most serious was the Vietnam war. Almost unnoticed by the American public, to say nothing of the Japanese, the United States had gradually become involved in military activities in the divided former French colony of Indochina. During 1965 this involvement became massive, and it grew into a large and terrible war over the next several years. Some Japanese had been critical of American intervention in Vietnam all along, but now most of the public became deeply concerned. To many it seemed that the old Marxist theory was proving right: The great “capitalist” power was showing its inevitable “imperialistic” tendencies and pressing mindlessly forward in a constantly expanding war that could spread to China, as the Korean war had, possibly involve the Soviet Union, and end up by drawing Japan in too. The security treaty with the United States, just as the leftists said, might lead to insecurity rather than peace.
Japanese quite rightly tended to equate the American entrapment in the quagmire of Vietnam with the fate of their own armies in China in the thirties. Battles might be won with superior weapons, but local nationalism would triumph in the long run. Also, American bombing reminded them of what they had suffered in World War II. Their sympathies were with the Vietnamese. The enterprising Japanese press and television networks provided their public with the same visual and verbal fare that shocked Americans, and the Japanese reacted with even greater revulsion. The image of the United States, which had been so favorable just a few years earlier when Kennedy was president, steadily worsened. Violent race and urban disorders in the United States, which were at least partially related to the Vietnam war, further damaged the reputation of the country. Accustomed to the extreme homogeneity of their own tight society, the Japanese were appalled by the problems of an ethnically diverse land. These they viewed more with sympathy or condescension than with condemnation. But many Japanese concluded that the United States was a weaker and less stable nation than they had thought, and they began to have doubts about the continuing value of American friendship and protection.
The rising sense of national pride made Japanese less tolerant of rigid American policies not only in the Vietnam war, but in other matters as well. Sato himself enunciated in 1971 three nuclear principles for Japan, which were not to produce, possess, or introduce any nuclear weapons. In particular the Japanese chafed at what they felt was American prevention of the establishment of normal relations between Japan and its great and historically revered neighbor, China. To Japanese, it seemed that Americans, safely across the Pacific and possessing their own natural resources, could ignore trade with China and maintain an attitude of unrelenting hostility, but that Japan could not take the same stand toward this fifth of humanity living, as it were, right next door. Before World War II China had seemed an area of vital economic importance to Japan, and even under changed postwar conditions it appeared to have great economic significance to Japan.
Actually the United States did not stand as much in the way of the development of Sino-Japanese relations as the Japanese public assumed. Although the Japanese government felt it prudent to follow official American attitudes toward China, by the late sixties a large amount of trade and cultural contacts had grown up between China and Japan on the basis of Japan’s formula of “the separation of politics and economics,” which Peking vociferously denounced. Japan had become China’s largest trading partner by far, though trade between the two countries remained a relatively insignificant 2 to 3 percent of Japan’s worldwide international commerce. Part of the Sino-Japanese trade, known as “memorandum trade,” was carried out under a semiofficial agreement between the two countries, the rest through so-called friendly firms in Japan. In some cases these were dummy companies set up by big corporations that did not wish to risk endangering their relations with their American associates by trading with China openly. Japan had also developed more cultural contacts with China than had any other country, including even the communist nations.
Despite all these relations with the People’s Republic, Japan’s trade and other con
tacts with the Republic of China on Taiwan remained far more significant, as did its trade with South Korea. Both Taiwan and South Korea were violently opposed to Peking, and their attitudes underlined American policies in inhibiting the Japanese government from following the inclination of most Japanese, who wanted to extend diplomatic recognition to Peking, as most of America’s other chief allies had already done. Unhappiness over the lack of full relations with China joined with indignation and fear regarding the Vietnam war to create a rapidly growing anti-Americanism in Japan. This found ready targets in the American military bases in Japan and in the flow of men and materiel through them to the war in Vietnam. Demonstrations against American bases proliferated and became more violent. The mass media became increasingly shrill in its condemnation of the United States. The more prosperous and self-confident Japan became, the less tolerable was continued subservience to American foreign policy and the presence of American bases on Japanese soil.
Several other factors helped to make the late sixties a period of rising tensions with the United States. One was the realization that it was not far to June 23, 1970, the terminal date for the revised security treaty, after which it could be denounced by either side on one year’s notice. Ever since their failure to block the treaty in 1960, all its opponents had aimed at 1970 as the time to break the relationship with the United States and throw the conservatives out of power. As the date drew near, political tensions mounted, and some groups consciously began preparing for the “crisis of 1970.”
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