Letter from Tokyo

Everybody knows that already Japan has surpassed West Germany’s gross national product, will soon exceed the combined product of West Germany and France, and some time later the combined product of all six member countries of the European Economic Community. Impressive? Yes. Meaningful? Not of itself. The question, whither Japan, cannot be answered by economic statistics. Behind them the political picture is nowhere near as clear or promising. It is, rather, a picture of considerable confusion.

Take party politics, for example. The governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) looks not only conservative enough but also familiar to American eyes. It is what one might call an “establishment party,” a coalition of the main parts of Japanese society, the coalition held together not by an ideology but by the expediency of the struggle for office in a democratic setting. In the United States we have two establishment parties, which means that either is acceptable to all the voters as representing this country’s chief regional, vocational, social and ethnic elements. In Japan there is no other such representative coalition outside of the LDP. The opposition consists of a variety of ideological groups, divided into a socialist and a Buddhist opposition. Within the socialist opposition we again have the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Left consists (from left to right) of the Socialist Party (JSP), the Communist Party (JCP) and the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP). The Communists make a deliberate effort here to hold the middle position, applying the “new strategy” which seeks eventual Communist victory by the road of coalition politics. The JCP is beginning to resemble the Italian and French Communist parties. It keeps equidistant from Peking and Moscow and vaunts its authentic-looking posture of traditional nationalism, on the strength of which it has already offered itself as the logical coalition partner for the LDP.

GN

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Gerhart Niemeyer

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Everybody knows that already Japan has surpassed West Germany’s gross national product, will soon exceed the combined product of West Germany and France, and some time later the combined product of all six member countries of the European Economic Community. Impressive? Yes. Meaningful? Not of itself. The question, whither Japan, cannot be answered by economic statistics. Behind them the political picture is nowhere near as clear or promising. It is, rather, a picture of considerable confusion.

Take party politics, for example. The governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) looks not only conservative enough but also familiar to American eyes. It is what one might call an “establishment party,” a coalition of the main parts of Japanese society, the coalition held together not by an ideology but by the expediency of the struggle for office in a democratic setting. In the United States we have two establishment parties, which means that either is acceptable to all the voters as representing this country’s chief regional, vocational, social and ethnic elements. In Japan there is no other such representative coalition outside of the LDP. The opposition consists of a variety of ideological groups, divided into a socialist and a Buddhist opposition. Within the socialist opposition we again have the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Left consists (from left to right) of the Socialist Party (JSP), the Communist Party (JCP) and the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP). The Communists make a deliberate effort here to hold the middle position, applying the “new strategy” which seeks eventual Communist victory by the road of coalition politics. The JCP is beginning to resemble the Italian and French Communist parties. It keeps equidistant from Peking and Moscow and vaunts its authentic-looking posture of traditional nationalism, on the strength of which it has already offered itself as the logical coalition partner for the LDP.