...and Japan
Henry Stokes
Great change is afoot in Japan. Since the Pacific War the country has been run by a coalition of conservative factions, much as Italy; these were formally combined into the ruling (Liberal Democratic) party in the mid-1950s. This party, however, like the Christian Democrats in Italy, has been dependent on funny money from abroad; it has received help from US corporations and also from the CIA. Without these flows it is doubtful whether the Japanese conservative party would have survived; the men at the top—and once again Rome comes to mind—are in politics out of selfinterest, caring little for principle. Now the remittances from America are stopping; and nothing on earth can save the present rulers of Japan. Before long, as in Italy once more, there will be elections in which the Communist Party, the only organisation with clean hands, will make gains (though the Japanese communists are a small minority as compared with the Italians, having less than forty seats in a house of 600).
In Italy the focus of interest is upon Signor Berlinguer, leader of the Communist Party, which is on the verge of equality at the polls with the Christian Democrats. The Communists in Japan are led by an extraordinary impressive individual, Kenji Miyamoto, the only charismatic figure in Japanese politics, a man of broad culture; but the party is small by comparison with the Socialists, lacks the mass membership of another opposition party, the so-called Komeito (a militant Buddhist organisation), and has a further rival, the Social Democratic Party. No, the centre of interest remains the conservatives in Japan, who have never—unlike their Italian counterparts—been forced into coalition with other parties, having had sufficient strength to rule by themselves; and here attention has been concentrated on the man whose money made possible the formation of the Liberal Democratic Party in the mid-I950s, a fellow called Kodama.
This man was an ultra-nationalist in the 1930s (imprisoned then for six years) who turned intelligence agent cum businessman during the Pacific War, and acted as purchasing officer for the Imperial Navy in Shanghai. In this capacity he amassed not only the copper required by the Navy for its aircraft but also gold, diamonds and platinum to the value of £6 million—a great fortune at the time—most of which he cached before being taken into prison by the Americans as a 'Class A' war criminal suspect. This loot was subsequently used to create the party that has presided over the Japanese economic 'miracle' these past twenty years, Kodama himself having been released by the Americans after three years of inconsequential study of his case. While in prison with notables of the wartime regime Kodama had become an ally of Nobusuke Kishi, to be Prime Minister in the late 1950s, but he himself had to stay in the background because of his unsavoury reputation (Kodama, after his release from jail, became leader of the Japanese underworld and the right-wing groups that are associated with the gangs).
It is the Lockheed affair which, as in Italy, has brought matters to a head. In testimony before the Senate committee investigating the company's largesse overseas Lockheed men have stated that F47 million went to Kodama between 1959 and 1974; the money was intended to get
him to influence government choice of foreign aircraft. That he has been involved in such work since the late 1950s is confirmed by Sugaino Diary, a record of his years in prison after the defeat of 1945, which contains a foreword by a right-wing politician that singles out Kodama's efforts in the field of government aircraft purchases for praise. Not long before the Lockheed affair started Kodama had a stroke and at the beginning of this month he was wheeled out of his residence in Tokyo on a stretcher and taken to hospital.
But it is not just Lockheed that has undone the conservatives; this has been nn more than an incident. The whole mood In the country has run steadily against thern since about 1970; in that year the Government staged the monstrous and vulgar World Fair in Osaka--a catastrophic display of bad taste—duly opened by the Emperor and intended to seal Japan's reputation in the world (it did nothing of the kind). Two years later there came to power a prime minister whose brash use of money surprised even a public inured to the notion that the conservatives stayed in power .bY buying votes; Kakuei Tanaka, who remains the richest man in Japanese politics to this day, was duly forced to resign after an unprecedented outburst of public dislike. Tanaka had presided over the biggest inflation in twenty-five years during which the mammoth trading companies that dominate Japanese commerce had cornered commodities left; right and centre and made enormous profits; anger with these companies led to the first serious attempt to. strengthen the pathetically weak Antimonopoly Law since its inception thirty years ago. Lockheed, then, burst on a Japanese public long disenchanted of the conservatives.
The crisis that now reigns in Japan MaY be compared with the 'Siemens scandal', an affair of pots-de-yin that brought down government in Meiji Japan at the turn 01 the century. But Japan was at that time set on the path of reaction, hobbled with a constitution framed on imperial German lines that had laid a foundation for the excessive Emperor-worship of a later age. Today Japan has a constitution inherited from the Occupation but far from discredited; it guarantees democratic rights. It will be a pleasure to watch the present ruling party of Japan being duly dispatched by democratic processes; elections have to take place by the autumn and should be fun. The great question is whether the ground is being laid for closer relations with China (a step strongly opposed by the Communist Party, which values independence) and for the hallowed combination of Chinese labour and Japanese capital that would assuredly change the whole balance of power between East and West. The. t question will not, however, be answered in the short term; for the time being it is Ps; a matter of when and how the wretched_ Liberal Democrats of Japan are seen 0" the stage.
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