Nobody thinks that the Japanese are going to take over the world, but contemporary Japan can be cited as an example of success, built from the right. Or not? The Liberal Democratic Party (PLD) has governed almost uninterruptedly since the American occupation forces returned the reins of power to the Japanese in 1952. However, the book Japó roig (Manifest, 2024) / Left and revolution (Bellaterra , 2020), by Ferran de Vargas, presents a society much more turbulent than we had been led to believe.
As De Vargas recalls, formations of communist and socialist affiliation dominated the immediate post-war period and continued to mark the political debate for some decades. Coinciding with the Korean War, the Japanese Communist Party even embraced guerrilla warfare, taking to Mount Fuji. Then, repression, purges and ideological splits, in the heat of May 68, pushed some Japanese to cross the line of international terrorism.
Less than two years ago, in Tokyo, a 76-year-old woman seemed to come out of a time machine, rather than her cell. Fusako Shigenobu, co-founder of the Japanese Red Army, had more than fully served her twenty-year sentence for involvement – which she denies – in the hijacking of the French embassy in The Hague. Also in the seventies, her organization murdered the Israeli Oppenheimer, Aharon Katzir, at the Tel Aviv airport in a shootout that left 26 dead. With oriental gentleness, Fusako apologized “for having hurt people she didn’t know.”
The political scientist De Vargas (1989), who no longer lives in Kobe but in Barcelona, ??explains over the phone that Japan, which was much more than a spa where cherry trees bloomed. In the postwar period, he says, the guidebook of the American occupiers was, in fact, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, where the anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote that the Japanese “lacked the revolutionary spirit.” That is why they did not hesitate to release the communists from prison, since the enemies of the Allies had been the Japanese fascists and militarists, responsible for millions of deaths in Asia, starting with their own people. That is why they were shocked by the workers’ occupation of factories or newspapers and, in less than two years, the call for a general strike. There General MacArthur – who until then had swallowed the democratizing recipes of followers of Roosevelt’s New Deal – stood up.
– MacArthur banned the strike and the Japanese communists complied. But they realized that the freedom that the Americans spoke of had a limit. That was the end of what had been a de facto alliance. Until then, the analysis of the Japanese communists was that their country was still semi-feudal and that the external element was a necessary stimulus.
– They had the bourgeois revolution pending.
– Yes, and the Americans began by dismantling oligopolies, distributing land – as Fidel Castro would remind them – and purging officials of the old regime, without touching the emperor. But then they take a turn and his intelligence chief, for example, becomes a declared admirer of Franco.
– It’s the Cold War.
– And they cling to this to rebuild the Japanese monopolies and allow them to return to Korea and the countries they had subdued during World War II, in Southeast Asia.
– Mao was about to win the Chinese civil war.
– Which led them to look at Japan with different eyes, as a bulwark in Asia for the US, a role that until then Chiang Kai-shek’s China was trusted to play.
– And another conflagration was just around the corner.
– The Korean War was Japan’s Marshall plan. A manna, like later the Vietnam War. Industrial production was doubled in three or four years, to meet the needs of the US army. In fact, it will be in 1965, with the beginning of the American bombings of Vietnam from their bases in Japan, when the boom of the Japanese economy intensifies. During that five years, Japan will grow by 14% annually. Between 10% and 20% of its foreign trade was related to the Vietnam War.
– By all accounts, the surprising murder of Shinzo Abe, a couple of years ago, is far from being the only political crime in contemporary Japan.
– The leader of the Socialist Party, Inejiro Asanuma, who opposed the Security Treaty with the US, was assassinated live during a television debate in 1960. A young fascist pierced him with a katana. The general secretary of the Communist Party was stabbed. And in 1961 there was a coup attempt.
– Plus the insurrectionary proclamation, in 1970, of Yukio Mishima, the great reactionary writer.
– Yes, although what most separated Mishima from the university students was his devotion to the emperor.
– Japanese universities were not a haven of peace.
– The classrooms were blocked for two years and seventy-five rectors resigned. The great May of ’68 was in Tokyo, more than in Paris.
– But no one moves the chair for the Liberal Democratic Party (PLD).
– The PLD reaped what the agrarian confiscation had sown. The former day laborers, converted into small landowners, voted conservative. The left had university students, it had an intellectual elite, it had workers, civil servants, but… in fact, MacArthur had already taken away the right to strike from the civil servants.
– MacArthur left, but the United States never left.
– In the sixties, the Japanese government considered making a pact with Mao and explored the establishment of diplomatic relations with China. Kennedy reacted by opening the American market even further to Japanese products, so that he would not. That is why, when a decade later, it is Nixon who is photographed with Mao in Beijing, behind Japan’s back, it feels terrible to them.
– Then came the oil crisis, in 1973.
– To which Japan gave a different response than the West. The Japanese State, instead of withdrawing, began to invest more. So the blow stopped and Japan continued to grow – although not at the same rate as in the sixties – with socio-political and cultural consequences.
– The West, making a virtue of necessity, accelerated the incorporation of women into the workforce.
– While in Japan the opposite happened. In 1970, there were more Japanese than American female workers, proportionately. This was reversed in the middle of that decade. With Japan now converted into the world’s factory, the Japanese woman returns home.
– Japanese men and women avoid talking about politics. Is it your idiosyncrasy?
– No, that’s not being Japanese. It is a construct. The proof is that Japanese people born in the sixties and seventies have more political culture and discuss politics more. According to my observation, in Japan, the younger, the more conservative. Although in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident there was a resurgence of interest in politics.
– The late LDP prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was the son of a foreign minister, the great-nephew of the prime minister and the grandson of the prime minister.
– His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was convicted as a war criminal for his legalization of slave labor in Manchuria, which they called Manchukuo. But then the Americans themselves rehabilitated him, due to his experience in industrialization. As prime minister, he suffered the largest demonstration in the history of Japan, against the renewal of the Security Treaty with the United States. Tokyo informed Washington that it could not guarantee Eisenhower’s safety, which was to be the first visit by a US president and which had to be cancelled. Eisenhower did not forgive the image of weakness and Kishi ended up leaving the scene.
– He does, but not his party. Why does the right “always” win in Japan?
– Because Japan has the best coordinated employers and the most cohesive and intelligent elite in the world. In the sixties, when it was believed that the left was going to win, the PLD incorporated aspects of its program. A minimum pension system, a minimum of investments in education and health and a lot of money for infrastructure.
– That’s all?
– Well, that and the CIA once massively financed the Liberal Democratic Party. Then there is that, the Japanese Socialist Party, in the mid-eighties, had not yet abandoned Marxism, when everyone had television. It did not adapt and, in the early 1990s, it disappeared. How the center-left Democratic Party disappeared.
– The right would do something right and the left would do something wrong.
– The decline of the left began in the seventies. When they started killing each other, literally, in ideological purges. The Japanese on the street began to see the left as something dangerous.
– The country’s stagnation began somewhat later.
– Of course, when Japan stops having the strategic importance it had during the Cold War. Although I could have it again.
– Was there a “tension strategy” in Japan, a decade ahead of Italy or Turkey?
– Well, I hadn’t thought about it. There were strange things, like some train attacks. And then there was the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia.
– Count.
– Saying Yakuza is saying anti-communism. In fact, a war criminal like Yoshio Kodama became one of the richest men in Asia, heading the Japanese mafia, closely linked to the extreme right. The intelligence and defense services incorporated them into their ranks, to “bring order” to the streets.
– There is no clean wheat.
– While the extreme left consciously allowed itself to be used by the Palestinian movement and, in the case of the Japanese Red Army, as demonstrated in the case of several members, by the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It is the time when a journalist asked a minister if Japan planned to export something more than transistors and terrorists.
– He says that “Japanese-style strikes” are very much a myth. But postwar Japanese carried signs asking for more food so they could work more. Not the other way around.
– Kishi’s successors took note and promised to double the income of wage earners within ten years. And they did it, even in less time.
– We all admire the perfectionism, discipline, sober sophistication and aesthetic sense of Japan. But is its social harmony a myth?
– Well, there is a consensus left and right that Japan should focus on its economic development. Therefore, what divides them is, above all, national security. The military projection and the alliance with the United States, their military bases and their use in regional wars, as already happened in Korea and Vietnam. Kishi’s failure was to make a flag of this, which is what divides the country, instead of focusing on the economy. His grandson, Shinzo Abe, made the same mistake in his first term, when he talked so much about the army and that is why it lasted as short as it did. Instead, when he returned to power, he put the economy at the center, abenomics, and although the results fell short, it lasted much longer. He copied the recipe from his grandfather’s successors to the point of also organizing the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
– But Japan no longer smells of the future. What is its legacy?
– Unemployment remains low…
– With a dwindling population.
– …but it is true that the Japanese have lost quality of life in the last twenty years.
– The assassination of Shinzo Abe provoked more criticism of his party than of the murderer himself.
– It’s wrong to say it, but the gunman managed to put the focus where he wanted, on the influence of the Moon sect.
– It makes your hair stand on end that 179 LDP deputies acknowledged “contacts” with the Moon sect. That is, bites.
-The introducer of this sect…
– Anti-communist.
– …an anti-communist, in the sixties, he was Shinzo Abe’s grandfather, who in fact gave them a building he owned as their headquarters.
– Is it a problem for all parties?
– No, it’s a PLD problem. The Moon sect is not interested in other parties because they have no meaning. Although within the PLD there are different factions and the fun thing is that they meet on the same day and at the same time, so as not to bother each other.
– The Communist Party of Japan (CPJ) has just elected a new general secretary after 23 years. For the first time, a woman, Tomoko Tamura.
– It evolves, to the point that the PCJ has stopped being republican. Since the last decade, he accepts the emperor.
– He says that the sectarianism and violence of the extreme left ended up stigmatizing the entire left. Has he recovered?
– The center-left Democratic Party governed between 2009 and 2012. But it was unlucky to be caught by the Fukushima disaster, in which it paid for the construction failures of its predecessors. Furthermore, he made the mistake that I have already mentioned before, by putting security issues at the center of the debate, in his case, a very firm opposition to US bases.
– Well, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also seems focused on those issues. When he is not talking about rearming the army and strengthening ties with the US and its allies, he is exploring a meeting with Kim Jong Un.
-I prefer not to comment on current events.
– There are many Koreans in Japan and among them, those who identify with North Korea, although a minority, are still many.
– Korean descendants have always had an important weight in the Japanese Communist Party. But wow, they don’t depend on them. Japanese is the fourth language in which the most Marxist theory has been written.
– The geography of the left in Japan is surprising.
– Yes, because the reddest city is Kyoto, which is also the city of traditions, of geishas, ??but which had a communist mayor for two decades.
– Even knowing the destruction of the war, why in such a rich country are the cities so ugly?
– It is an ugliness that comes from what was torn down and raised for the 1964 games, with developmentalism.
– Your book ends in 1972.
– Yes, but in the new edition, in Catalan, Professor Josep Lluís Alay takes up the Japanese armed struggle from that date on in the prologue.
– You were born with the burst of the Japanese bubble, in 1989. Didn’t you have a fascination with South Korea, more than Japan?
– No, no, fans of everything Korean are younger than me.
– Your generation had the cheeky Shin-chan, but mine was traumatized by Mazinger Z and the “breasts out!” by Aphrodite A. Machismo and violence.
– Ha ha. But not all anime are like that… well, if I’m not mistaken, the Doraemon artist also has a Mao life in comics.
