Comfortable Marxists of Japan By EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER T RE Socialist Party

of Japan has refused to sign the recent Oslo declaration of the Socialist International, and has made public a statement of its displeasure with that document, which it finds unsuited to the needs of Asia.

To the alien observer, the Japanese statement would seem to raise more questions about the Socialist Party of Japan than it does about the Oslo declaration. 'Asia' is not so much a politi- cal or economic entity as it is a state of mind, and Japan is showing impressive signs of de- parting from whatever reality 'Asia' has and joining the Atlantic world. It is possible, then, that if the Socialist Party is right about the irrelevance of the Oslo declaration to the needs of Asia, it is, in condemning that declaration, confessing its own departure from the realities of Japan.

Socialism in Europe faces the problem of how to preserve its identity in a solidly bourgeois world. Revolution will no longer do. The Socialist Party of Japan, obsessed with the myth of Asia, goes on talking revolution, and does not seem to have noticed that bourgeois solidity may be overtaking Japan too.

Japan has been going through an extraordinary boom since 1959. The economy has been grow- ing faster than that of any other industrialised country. Although the boom itself has pro- duced strains, notably inflation and a drain on the currency reserves, the fact remains that the consumption level has risen with the growth of the economy. There has also been a remark- able growth of interest in the stock market, a sure sign of enthourgeoisement.

Even before the boom got under way, actual per capita income in Japan was rising faster than in Europe or America. The index by 1959 had risen to 152 (with 1953 as 100), as com- pared to 138 (again with 1953 the base year) for West Germany and 134 for Italy, the next fastest climbers. Japan had already left the rest of Asia far behind, and statistics for 1961, when they are available, will probably show the Japan- ese per capita share of the gross national product fast catching up with the Italian. Indeed, actual income and consumption in the big cities are probably approximately up to the Italian level already. A rural lag pulls the national average down. Since Italy, too, has disparities, this means that Tokyo and Osaka are still some distance away from the affluence of northern Italy. They are probably farther ahead of Seoul and Manila in the race, however, than they are behind Milan.

And so they have all the joys arid pains of near-affluence. The number of private auto- mobiles is still small compared with that in any advanced European country, but until 1959 it was growing at about the same rate as in Ger- many, and since then it has been growing faster. 'The streets of Tokyo and Osaka are not pre- pared for the rush, and neither, apparently, are the driver and the pedestrian, for the two cities rank first and second in the world in point of annual traffic casualties.

A small automobile is no longer beyond the dreams of the middle-class Japanese. In many ways Japan would seem to be at about the point the United States reached some forty years ago, with families of moderate means able to buy rather elaborate durable goods. Expensive cameras are being crowded out as the ultimate dream of what the Japanese call 'salarymen.'

They are being replaced by a little bubble of an automobile called the Subaru, and that will in turn be replaced one day by the Cedric and the Toyopet, and, perhaps, the yearly trade-in, so that badly-tended used cars will be around to break down at intersections and add another dimension to the traffic problem. The incidence of television sets has reached the saturation point in the cities, and seems well on the way to ruining the movies. Even in the countryside there are about as many television sets in proportion to the total number of households as there are in Germany, and far more than in France.

Evidences of approaching affluence are ap- parent elsewhere too. Year by year a smaller part of the Japanese diet is given over to staple foods, and today it is well below half even in the most backward provinces. The result is that people are getting bigger. Sons are bigger than fathers, and there are dreams of the day when Japanese will be big enough to compete in the American baseball leagues. People also live longer and presently die of highly civilised diseases. Tuberculosis used to be the most dreaded of diseases. Now it has been con- quered, and heart ailments, cancer and apoplexy are the principal causes of death.

Among people in their teens and twenties, tuberculosis has been replaced as the principal cause of death by suicide. This is a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, but in other ways the youth of the country are behaving exactly as they do elsewhere when the lure of the streets and the boredom of plenty overtake them. The Japanese crime rate fell shortly after the begin- ning of the Korean War, which was also the beginning of economic recovery. The drop may be taken as signalling the end of post-war desperation. Now it is rising again, and the rise is almost entirely attributable to a rise in juvenile delinquency. It was older people who went astray in the hard years after the war. Now it is the young, and the crime rate is rising most rapidly among the very youngest of them for whom statistics are available, people four- teen and fifteen. With 1954 as 100, arrests for rape among boys of fourteen and fifteen were up to 283 by 1959, whereas with boys of eighteen and nineteen the figure had only risen to 215. In the case of arrests for extortion and intimidation, the comparable figures were 867 and 353.

What all these facts suggest is that Japan is leaving behind the pleasures and problems of primitive Asia, and finding in their place the pleasures and problems of the Atlantic com- munity. Perhaps the most significant develop- ment of all has to do with the diffusion of what American stockbrokers call 'a stake in your country's future.' By the end of 1961 the total number of stockholdings was such that, if dis- tributed one per family, one Japanese family in six owned stock. This was still behind the Ameri- can proportion of one in four, but far ahead of Germany, one in twenty-five. If every stockholder Owned not one but three stocks, the total num- ber of holders had risen to about three and a half million people, as compared with an esti- mated half-million at the end of the war. By 1961, in other words, perhaps seven people had a direct interest in the workings of 'monopoly capital' for every one person who had such an interest in 1945.

Even if every stockholder has a wife who, as in most countries, votes as he does, the total stock market vote today comes to only about a sixth of the total vote in the last general elec- tions. Yet it is in the cities that holdings are increasing most rapidly, and it is the cities that account for the greater part of the Socialist vote. Most farmers can be counted upon to vote Conservative whatever happens, and six million people, all with stakes in their country's capitalist future, concentrated in the largest cities, ought to be a matter of some concern to Socialist poli- ticians. One would think that they would be a bit chary of talking in terms that imply the de- struction of stocks and stock markets.

The problem is, of course, by no moans as simple as such a remark suggests. Consistency, has never been the strongest point of the Japanese, and even if it were there would be nothing to keep a revolutionary from also being a stockholder. The voting habits of the urban Japanese are, moreover, curious. Education and middle-class comforts seem to bring not con- tentment, but dissatisfaction, and the strongest radical centres in Tokyo are not the slums, but the white-collar districts. It is from the new apartment-house suburbs to the south and west that Communists are elected to the city council. Nor is there the tendency that is growing in England to vote third party by way of protest against both of the Establishments. All third parties seem doomed to strangulation as par- liamentary forces, and most Japanese assume that if they do not vote Conservative they must either vote Socialist or not vote at all.

Yet, provided that the buying of stocks con- tinues to be a profitable pursuit, it would be strange indeed if these millions of small capi- talists did not presently tire of being asked to vote for a party whose main message to them is that their day is over. Many people today vote Socialist because they cannot stomach the Conservatives. Unless the Socialist Party changes, and unless, again, the economy gets in trouble, as many or more people will probably vote Con- servative tomorrow for similar reasons.

There is little sign that the party is changing. It moves slightly to the Right before every elec- tion, but in the main it is unique among the Socialist Parties of the world in its dedication to scholastic Marxism. The party platform is an incoherent jumble, talking in one breath of parliamentariaoisin and in the next of revolu- tion, and nowhere making clear what the fate of the former will be when the latter is accomp- lished. It was put together in 1955 to mend a doctrinal split. In true Japanese fashion it mended the split by ignoring it. Today the Left wing of the party, backed by the most powerful labour unions, dominates the party councils and keeps them from wobbling in the direction of 'revisionism' or 'opportunism.'

There has been talk in recent years of 'struc- tural reform,' a concept borrowed from the Italian Communists and widely hailed at the time of its adoption as heralding a departure from the old orthodoxy. Through the murk of its prose there seemed to come hints of gradualism. At the most recent party conven- tion, however, structural reform was demoted from 'strategy' to 'tactics,' the implication being that the party needed only to wait for the revolutionary moment to arrive, and that the wait would not be long. Almost simultaneously it put itself on record as believing American imperialism to be the common enemy of Japan and Communist China. With elections coming this summer, it can be expected to play these matters down and to emphasise instead its 'neutral' wish to be friends . with everyone. Whenever it must take a specific position in international affairs, however, that position shows the neutralism of the party to derive from the Leninist view of imperialism and the origins of war. One wishes to be neutral, of course, but one can scarcely be indifferent to war- mongering, and Lenin had the last words on where that odious practice is indulged in.

Perhaps the Socialist Party will change. Before it does, the labour unions that are its chief sup- port will have to change too, and they, composed to a remarkable extent of white-collar workers, may one day feel the pressure of embourgeoise- ment. Yet a change in the mood of a union's membership is slow in working a similar change upon its leadership, and the signs that any pro- found change is being worked upon the Socialist Party are very dim. Today it is smiling and affable, for it faces elections. In six months it will once more be stridently doctrinaire, for it will face a convention, and must worry not about the electorate but about union leaders and party apparatchiks.

If Japan continues to move away from Asia and toward Europe, it may be expected that Socialism will face the problems in Japan that it faces in Europe, and revolutionary Marxism will come to seem increasingly divorced from reality. The Socialist Party of Japan may, there- fore, be a minority for a very long time unless it changes. Its eccentricities are due in some measure to pressure from union leaders, but also to the fact that it is so far from power. Hence it may become more and more eccentric as power recedes farther into the distance. Meanwhile Lord Acton's dictum may begin to work upon the Con- servatives, confident of perpetual power.

It is not a happy prospect. Yet the British Labour Party would seem to have demonstrated that the circle can be broken, and it may be that a slow edging toward power, helped along by the increasing importance of the young voter, will have a sobering effect on the Japanese Socialists, and make them see that the masses are not being impoverished and just possibly resent being told that they are.