Communists to overtake socialists

One aspect of Japanese uniqueness has been that it is virtually the only country in which the Socialist party is often as doctrinaire and ideological as the Communist party. Continuing his articles on tomorrow's Japanese general election, our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin reports that one likely result will be that the Communists could become a larger minority in the Diet than the Socialists.

HONG KONG (JP): As Japanese voters get ready to go to the polls in the 20th general election under its postwar democracy, one result is already fairly certain: the election will see the destruction of the parliamentary strength of the Japan Socialist Party, and maybe its complete elimination.

But as the Socialists go down, the Japan Communist Party is almost certain to grow, as a result of the introduction of proportional representation.

Essentially, the Japan Socialist Party changed its name too late to do it any good. For some curious reason the Japan Socialist Party became the Social Democratic Party of Japan in English a long time ago. But until last year the change was not made in Japanese.

The procrastination on this arcane point was indicative of the deep splits in the Socialist party between the doctrinaire leftist factions, and the more centrist factions. The verbal change in Japanese, when it finally arrived, was less verbally sharp than the earlier departure in English -- from Nihon Shakaito to Shakai Minshuto.

Much earlier, the right wing of the Socialists split away completely in 1959 to form the Democratic Socialist Party, which was one of several parties that merged in 1995 to form Shinshinto, the New Frontier Party.

In the last election in 1993, the Japan Socialist Party improved its performance to win 15.4 percent of the vote and a total of 70 seats.

Next Sunday, the party cannot even hope to repeat that accomplishment since it has not put up enough candidates. The Socialists will pay heavily at the polls for their cynical maneuver in bringing down the reformist coalition led by former prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa in 1994, followed by then forming an alliance with the long ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), in a government nominally led by Socialist Tomiichi Murayama.

The Socialists, by joining with the LDP, thereby set at naught their 38 years of consistent opposition to the LDP. The act so clearly subordinated principle to holding power that it helps account for the dangerously high level of Japanese voter apathy surrounding this election.

The Social Democratic Party of Japan is only contesting 43 out of the 300 single-seat constituencies which have now been introduced. Pointedly indicating that they do not think very highly of their chances of being returned for any seat, all 43 constituency candidates have also put themselves forward on the Socialist list of 48 persons standing for election to the seats awarded according to proportional representation.

As a desperate last-minute pre-election maneuver, Murayama stepped down as party leader, and House Speaker Takako Doi was recalled to the party leadership. The forthright Doi had led the Socialists to improved electoral performance in 1989 and 1992, amid numerous LDP scandals and the imposition of the consumption tax. Despite this success, she was then dumped as leader in a gambit which spoke volumes about the subordinate role imposed upon women in Japanese society and politics.

Ironically, it remains to be seen whether several dozen Socialists will be made to pay for another cynical ploy just before this election. Rather than run as Socialists again, they all jumped ship and quickly joined the new Democratic Party of Japan, Nihon Minshuto.

Minshuto was formed just before this election amid much media fanfare, generated mainly by the new party's idealistic and nonsocialist leaders. Whether these Socialists will be punished or rewarded for their latest dubious defection remains to be seen.

However, the Japan Communist Party, Nihon Kyosanto, now looks likely to reap some reward for having been far more consistent than the Socialists. This is because the introduction of proportional representation should benefit the Japan Communist Party.

In 1993, the communists, with 7.7 percent, secured exactly half the vote of the Socialists and won only 15 seats. This year, they have put up more candidates than any other party in the constituencies -- 299 for the 300 single-member seats.

This significant effort may not win many seats but it will bring out the party's members and supporters, who are sure to cast their second vote for the Japan Communist Party in the proportional representation seats. In contrast to the socialists, only 31 of the 299 communist constituency candidates are also standing in the proportional representation.

Altogether the Japan Communist Party is putting forward the third largest list of candidates, 321, behind the LDP (355) and Shinshinto (361). It seems certain to replace the Social Democratic Party of Japan as the largest party in parliament advocating socialist ideas.

Two facets of the Japan Communist Party merit attention. Indicating that women have advanced far less in Japanese democracy than in most developed nations, only 10 percent of all candidates now standing for election are female. But of the 153 women candidates, just over two-fifths, or 66 female candidates are from the Japan Communist Party. This is six times the number of women standing for the LDP, and three times the number of women standing for the populist left-of-center Minshuto.

Increased communist parliamentary strength, if it comes about, could influence the slowly growing Japanese debate over the nation's role in World War II. In their sternly critical stance of Japan's former aggressive role, the communist posture is ironically more in line with what East Asians and Westerners generally feel and think.

While the LDP party platform continues the conservative tendency to whitewash Japan's past actions, the Japan Communist Party, by contrast, never tries to maintain that events like Nanjing Massacre (in China in 1937) never took place.