Maoism in the Developed World

Takato Yamabe, writing in the dissident U.S. Trotskyist newspaper Labor Action, described the two conflicting points of view within the JCP in the postwar period. “There have been two elements in the JCP’s tactics and strategy from the outset. One is the vehemently anti-American, violent revolution position of Secretary General Kyuichi Tokuda, whose motto is ‘national independence’ the other is the moderate, peaceful-revolution position of Nosaka, who invented the slogan ‘beloved Communist Party’ immediately upon his return to Japan. … Whatever popular support the CP has in Japan is due to the Nosaka line. The last two years of adherence to Tokuda’s tactics of violence have cost the CP post of its mass following.”

It was the Nosaka line that was attacked by the Cominform, and the Chinese. The Cominform said that “Nosaka says that Japan has all of the conditions necessary for a peaceful transition to socialism even under military occupation … and that the CP is capable of taking power by democratic means via parliamentary institutions. … That this Nosaka theory has absolutely nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism is obvious. In essence, his theory is anti-democratic and anti-socialist.”

This blast brought a crisis within the Japanese CP. A Plenum of the Central Committee engaged in a “self-criticism” and resolved that “Our party has now corrected the faults and is developing along correct lines.” But at the same time, the CC statement noted that “Comrade Nosaka, as the most courageous of popular patriotic figures, has won the confidence of the masses.” Nosaka remained in the top leadership of the Japan Communist Party.[512] However, one British source noted that, with the temporary disgrace of Sanzo Nosaka, the “tough Kyuichi Tokuda was favored by the Russians, who made him leader of the Japanese party.”[513]

Early Attempts of JCP to Be Neutral

Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “secret” speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, in which he denounced Stalin, caused problems within the Japanese Communist Party leadership. But the first reaction of the JCP was to laud the 20th Congress without mentioning the Khrushchev.[514]

However, once the Sino-Soviet quarrels came into the public domain, the situation of the JCP became more difficult. The Central Committee of the JCP in November 1960 dealt with the problem. Under the leadership of the Secretary General Kenji Miyamoto, this meeting engaged in “a studied attempt to hew to a neutralist line between Moscow and Peking, with some positions being taken that accorded with current Chinese emphasis.” Miyamoto “deemed it necessary to take a position on the struggle between the Soviet Union and China.”[515]

Shortly before the JCP’s Eighth Congress in 1961, a pro-Soviet group, led by Kasuga and consisting of seven members of the Central Committee, resigned from the party. However, another pro-Soviet group, led by Yoshio Shiga, remained within its ranks.[516]

Even at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, where the Soviet leadership openly broke with the Albanians (and by proxy, virtually with the Chinese), the Japanese leadership sought to maintain its neutrality. Sanzio Nosaka, who led the Japanese fraternal delegation to that meeting, refused to condemn Albania and “urged unity within the Communist movement.”[517]

Japanese Communist Party Alignment with China

The end of Japanese neutrality in the Sino-Soviet dispute came, for the time being at least, in connection with the signing in July 1963 of a partial test-ban treaty between the United States and the USSR, open to the signatures of other countries. The Chinese denounced this treaty as “the greatest deception, designed to dupe the people of the whole world.”[518] The Japan Communist Party supported the Chinese position on the document.

Yoshio Shiga, who led those within the JCP who favored the treaty, wrote about what followed after the Central Committee strongly denounced the treaty. He wrote that “The ‘campaign to study the Seventh Plenum decisions’ started shortly thereafter has been used for slanderous attacks on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There was talk of ‘Khrushchev revisionism of the ‘Soviet Union acting in compact with the United States to betray the people,’ and so on and so forth. … Comrades who, in this atmosphere, resolutely support the treaty, or question the correctness of Central Committee views and assessments, are immediately branded as ‘revisionists,’ as ‘persons openly challenging party policy.’”[519]

When the test ban treaty came up for adoption in the Japanese Diet, Yoshio Shiga, one of the five JCP members of the lower house, and Ichizo Suzuki, a Communist member of the upper house, voted in favor of it. They were promptly expelled from the JCP, and established their own pro-Soviet Communist group, known as Voice of Japan.[520]