JAPAN LOCKHEED SCANDAL DEEPENS POLITICAL CRISIS by PIERRE ROUSSET On September 15 Takeo Miki, in his twofold capacity as Japanese Prime Minister and president of the ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP), ordered a cabinet shake-up and altered the composition of the leadership of the party. These measures of compromise among the various factions of the LDP probably herald the elimination of Miki, who has been placed in a minority in his own parliamentary group for not having successfully squelched the Lockheed bribery scandal. The LDP is supposed to hold an extraordinary congress soon to resolve the differences between the prime minister and his opponents, Fukada (vice-prime minister) and Ohira (minister of finance). Behind the personal and factional rivalries, this conflict manifests the sharpness of the tensions racking Japanese society today. In fact, one period is coming to an end, a period that has been thoroughly dominated by conservatives and shaped by a rapid economic growth of Japanese imperialism. It is this context of crisis of the system that explains the exceptional importance assumed by the scandal around the bribes generously distributed by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. The scandal The scandal broke last February following the revelations of the American Senate subcommittee on multinafional corporations. At the end of the 1960s the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation was in serious trouble. It had to corner the Japanese market in civilian "jumbojets"
Miki under attach Io a parts colleagu. and later in military anti-submarine detection planes. But its L-1011 Tristar could not compete with the Macdonald-Douglas DC-10 or the Boeing 747-SR. The private civilian firm Zenniku (All Nippon Airways) preferred the DC-10 in stocking its Airbus. And in 1972 the Japanese government decided that the construction of a new anti-submarine fighter plane would be awarded to a national company in order to foster the development of the Japanese aeronautics industry. But several months later the president of Zenniku had resigned, the firm had opted for the Tristar after all, and the government had annuled its previous decision and resolved to purchase the P3C-Orion, a Lockheed product. Once the background to the affair is known, the scandal takes on considerable proportions. The stakes are immense. The purchase of the P3C-Orions, for example, involved 600,000 million yen (more than S2, 100 million). The highest American and japanese political authorities were implicated in the scandal. It was after a meeting between Nixon (then president) and Kakuei Tanaka (then prime minister) that All Nippon Airways and the Japanese government suddenly changed their decisions. The bribes doled out ran to at least $12.5 million. The financial wheeling and dealing through which the multinationals escape government currency controls was exposed, as were links that have been woven in Japan among high finance, the political regime, organized crime, and the far right. Finally, the scandal illustrated the price the Japanese bourgeoisie is prepared to pay to maintain its special alliance with the United States.
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JAPAN Former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka was arrested on July 27, first on charges of violation of the currency laws, then for corruption. Tanaka was not merely the prime minister in office in 1972. He remained the strongest faction chief in the LDP, perhaps the most important politician in the country. He has since been released on bail. But his indictment has had greater impact than that which results from the charging of a top-level personality. Tanaka symbolizes the extreme interpenetration of finance and politics in Japan, which is called the "money regime, " another way of saying institutionalized corruption. More, he represents an entire epoch and regime. What is now coming to an end is the undisputed reign of the Liberal Democratic party. Political power has always been highly concentrated in Japan, in the image of the economic power on which it rests. The bourgeois revolution was carried out "from above" to a large extent, particularly on the initiative of a section of the old ruling classes. It occurred in 1868 and is known as the "Meiji Restoration. " The coun try has never experienced free-competition capitalism or classical bourgeois parliamentarism. And the defeat of Japanese imperialism in 1945 did not end this control of the regime by extremely narrow circles. Democratic reforms, sometimes deep ones, were enacted during the American occupation after the second world war. The agrarian and legal systems were overturned. But the dismantling of the Japanese combines, the zaibatsu, was only superficial and temporary. The government and the U.S. army soon put the conservatives back in the saddle in preparation for the beginnings of the cold war and then in response to the victory of the Chinese revolution. The Japanese-American alliance was firmly tied. It has never been challenged since. For thirty years now the same political personnel have monopolized government and state functions. The LDP was founded in 1955 on the basis of the fusion of the two conservative parties that existed at the time. It has been the sole government party ever since then. No other large bourgeois formation competes with it. The opposition, socialist for the most part, has been overwhelmed by the financial resources of the LDP and has never come close to winning an electoral majority. The Diet, the Japanese parliament, was transformed into a recording chamber. The real fights over orientation among the bourgeoisie occur within the LDP itself, where stable "factions" were formed in 1957. These factions are the channels by which particular capitalist interests are expressed and through which the financial handouts of big capital are doled out. Organized around particular political personalities, these factions perpetvate the traditions of patronage and institutionalized corruption of the precapitalist regimes. Postwar Japanese "bourgeois democracy" is thus charsupreme and the dependence of state functionaries on the personalities of the regime is total. The absence 18 of any political alternative blocks any recourse. There is no Democratic party or Socialist party capable of contending for succession. "Disloyalty to the conservative regime could cost a member of the bureaucratic elite holding-an economic post or an elegant life in old age as a director of a giant corporation. It would also cost him all chances of becoming a major part of the power mechanism, " wrote Imazu Hiroshi in the Japan Quarterly. "So long as the conservative regime lasted, the establishment figured with smug confidence, there would be no exposé from within of government secrets, or at least not from among the bureaucratic elite, the handlers of the top secrets. " (Japan Quarterly, July-September 1976, p. 230.) Under these conditions, money flowed freely into the coffers of the LDP. "Donations" by the big companies to the government party are legal. Under the Tanaka government, during the elections of 1972 and 1974, these donations officially amounted to 10,000 million yen (more than $35 million). In reality they were much greater. Tanaka himself had enough to hand out another 10,000 million yen to buy off votes of delegates to the LDP congress in order to get himself elected president of the party and thus assure his nomination for prime minister. This sentiment of corruption with impunity, this freedom of financial "transactions, " came through very clearly in the Lockheed scandal. Very few precautions seem to have been taken to avoid possible discovery of the palm greasing. And many members of parliament, especially those of the Tanaka faction, did not hesitate to publicly express their indignation at the indictment of their boss. Erosion of the regime But the crisis of the LDP does not date from the Lockheed scandal. The political system established during the middle of the 1950s is in fact extremely rigid, and the weight of the factions has tended to become paralyzing. As long ago as 1963, under the Ikeda government, plans had been presented to "modernize" the party, particularly by Takeo Miki, who was then president of the LDP's reform council. He asserted that the "unconditional dissolution of all intraparty factions is the prerequisite for party modernization. " (Cited by Minoru Shimizu, Japan Times, July 22, 1976.) With the end of the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, the electoral base of the LDP dwindled and its ability to impose a social and political consensus on the country narrowed. A rise of workers struggles began to take shape in 1973-74. The symptoms of the erosion of the regime were becoming increasingly clear when a small faction of the LDP led by Kono split, taking six members of parliament with it. On July 7, 1974, by-elections to the upper house of the Diet (roughty equivalent to the American Senate) gave the LDP only a small majority. (There is also a lower house in the Diet. Here the LDP still has a large majority. On the 1974 elections, see INPRECOR,
No.7, September 5, 1974.) In November of that year Tanaka had to resign his post as prime minister because of a personal financial scandal. The party was unable to settle on either of the two main contenders for succession, Takeo Fukada and Masayoshi Ohira, so Miki was chosen. His reputation as a "clean politician" could help in polishing up the LDP's image among public opinion and make it look like the party was being reformed. In addition, Miki headed one of the smallest factions in the party and thus did not threaten the big barons of the LDP. He was to head a caretaker government.
Kakuei Tanaka Then the Lockheed scandal broke. The popularity of the LDP dropped sharply and for the first time the problem of a coalition government was raised among public opinion as a real possibility. The links among the establishment, organized crime, and the far right were brought to light through personalities like Yoshio Kodama and Osano Kenji. The former is one of the main people implicated in the bribery scandal. He has the reputation of being a "kuromaku, " a gray eminence of Japanese politics, and has also turned out to be one of the main disbursers of Lockheed funds. Linked to organized crime, he is also one of the spokesmen of the ultranationalist far right. His fortune dates from the Sino-Japanese war, during which he set up a plunder operation on a broad scale, funded by the navy. This outfit is known as the Kodama Organ and has holdings in all varieties of resources: radium, diamonds, jade, rubies, platinum, other precious metals, and so on. Imprisoned in 1946 as a "Class A" war criminal, he was released three years later, without trial. Apparently this was in exchange for services rendered the Americans. It is now considered an established fact that "Kodama had a working relationship with the CIA from the time he was released from a Japanese prison in 1948. " (Tad Szulc, in the American weekly New Republic, April 10, 1976. On Kodamo and Osano in the Lockheed scandal, see also Hansawa Hiroshi in the July-September 1976 Japan Quarterly, John G. Roberts in the first quarter 1976 AMPO, and Yamakawa Akio in AMPO, second quarter 1976.) Kodamo has been in on all the action; he played an important role in the reorganization of the conservative parties in the 1950s, in the struggle against the workers movement and the radicalized youth, and in the normalization of diplomatic relations with South Korea.
The same is true of Osano, a businessman who is beginning to be implicated in the Lockheed scandal. Along with Kodama, he has been decorated by the South Korean dictatorship. In the August 28 issue of the Paris daily Le Monde Philippe Pons described him straightforwardly as "a dubious personality close to the Japanese mafia. ... He has most recently been Tanaka's main cash dispenser. ... Mr. Osano also holds a stock portfolio in the All Nippon Airways company. " The Lockheed scandal is exposing the hidden resources of the regime one after another. When, after six months of immobilism, the inquiry finally led to the arrest of Tanaka, the Japanese political world took the measure of the news. For the Japan Times, "the affair has become the most sensational political event in the thirty-year history of the conservative regime. ... Since the 'power of money' is a constituent element of the policy and practice of the Liberal Democratic party, the shock waves of the Tanaka arrest will run through the party as a whole." The faction struggle within the LDP took on a new dimension. The employers did not conceal their uneasiness and irritation at Miki's inability to head off the effects of the scandal. The president of Nikkeiren (Japan Federation of Employers' Associations) did not mince words: "The LDP elders pushed Miki into the post of prime minister. After he failed to live up to their expectations, they tried to pull him down, and in this they also failed. When he looks blank, they say he has the human touch, but he is a most irresponsible person. Miki only says nice things; he has never brought a single stick of firewood to the boiler. He may be all right as the chief of a public information section, but he does not qualify as a captain. " (Asahi Evening News, July 30, 1976.) The employers did not forgive Miki the "Bonapartist" rolé he attempted to play in trying to extract the LDP from the domination of the factions and the excessively direct intervention of financial powers. The three major factions of the LDP (those of Tanaka, Chira, and Fukada) and the small faction of Shiina have made common cause against Miki, who is supported only by the faction of the party's former general secretary, Nakasone. On August 24 a "wildcat" conference of LDP parliament members including two-thirds of LDP MPs and fifteen of the twenty members of the government asked for Miki's resignation. Nevertheless, the prime minister resisted these pressures. He knows that in the eyes of public opinion his forced resignation would look like an attempt to squelch the Lockheed scandal. He threatened to dissolve the Diet and call early elections. Nonetheless, he does not want to break the unity of the LDP on the eve of elections, which are scheduled for January in any case.
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JAPAN The September 15 cabinet shake-up and the changes in the leading bodies of the party represent the outcome of a succession of compromises. The government was not profoundly altered. On the one hand, Fukada and Ohira remain vice-prime minister and minister of finance respectively; on the other hand, Inaba, who was "responsible" for the arrest of Tanaka, remains minister of justice. But Miki's positions within the LDP have deteriorated. Nakasone is beginning to be overly implicated in the scandal. He was replaced as general secretary by Uchida, an opponent of Miki. The presidency of the council of political affairs also went to a Miki opponent, Sarurauchi. Only the presidency of the LDP executive council went to a person favorable to Miki, Matsuno. Moreover, Miki had to promise not to dissolve the Diet and to convoke a party congress before the next electoral contest. At that congress he will probably command the votes of only about 25 percent of the delegates. Failure of the spring offensive In 1975 the Japanese bourgeoisie resolved to take the offensive against an increasingly aggressive workers movement. The bourgeoisie had to take advantage of the recession to assure the restructuring of the economy and accelerate the ongoing process of concentration. It also wanted to rationalize a public sector whose growing deficit it was unwilling to cover. Now, it is precisely in this sector that the workers movement is most powerful and militant. The Japanese trade unions are generally organized into factory-based unions that include all the categories of workers in a given company; then they are assembled into federations by industrial branch and then into national confederations. The policy of the trusts has been to maximally integrate "their" workers. A twofold division of the workers movement has thus occurred. In the big companies lifetime employment is guaranteed for permanent workers, and wages increase with seniority. But 70 percent of the workers (seasonal workers and workers in small and middle-sized companies) live in insecurity. The rate of unionization thus varies considerably: In the companies with more than 500 employees it stands at 63 percent; for companies with 100-500 employees it is about one-third, and for small companies (employing between 30 and 100 people) it falls to 10 percent. (These figures and the following ones date from 1974. They are taken from an article by Chung S. B. which appeared in "Problèmes politiques ét sociaux" of "Documentation Française, "September 13-20, 1974.) A second division exists between the workers movement in the private and public sectors. The right-wing trade unions in the private sector benefit from the paternalist atmosphere that prevails in the large companies and from the identification of the interests of the factory unions with those of the management. The Domei (Japan Central Federation of Labor) is 90 percent composed 20 of trade unions in the private sector. Founded in 1964, it arose from a right-wing split that occurred in the Sohyo (General Council of Trade Unions of Japan) and currently supports the Democratic Socialist party, itself a right-wing split from the Socialist party. Sohyo is dominant in the public sector; 60 percent of the unions in Sohyo work in this sector. Founded in 1950 on the basis of an anticommunist split of Sanbetsu, it has since undergone a leftward evolution. It remains the largest union federation in Japan today and supports the left wing of the Socialist party (which is the majority of the SP). The Communist party intervenes in Sohyo, but it is a minority in general. (According to the statistics of the Ministry of Labor, Sohyo had 4, 314, 265 members in 1974; Domei had 2,277, 883. There are also two other confederations: Shinsanbetsu (National Federation of Industrial Labor Organizations), with 70,041 members, and Churitsuroren (Federation of Independent Unions), with 1, 374, 344 members.) On November 20, 1975, the Korokyo (Council of Public Corporation and Government Enterprise Workers Unions) organized an eight-hour strike in the public sector. The primary aim was to win the right to strike in this sector, which has been denied since the cold war. Sohyo hoped that Miki, a reputed "liberal, " would accede to the demands of the workers. In its breadth and organization the strike was an unprecedented success. In terms of the demands, however, it was an almost complete failure. The "hardline" wing of the LDP carried the day. This failure was especially serious since the government was preparing to lay off several dozen thousand workers in the public sector, particularly in the railroads, where the operating deficit is enormous, on the order of 5 million million yen (nearly 518, 000 million) a year, mainly because of the preferential rates accorded the large companies. Nevertheless, the outbreak of the Lockheed scandal in February 1976 threw the government onto the defensive. For one month, from mid-March to mid-April, there was an open political crisis. The opposition boycotted the Diet in order to force a debate on the revelations of the American Senate subcommittee. Strikes, demonstrations, and meetings broke out one after the other to demand that Japanese involvement be fully brought to light. A vast movement for the resignation of the LDP government seemed under way when the opposition split and then collapsed. The Democratic Socialist arty and the Komei (the Clean Government party, etty-bourgeois Buddhist formation) abandoned the boycott of parliament. The SP and CP soon followed suit and Japanese political life "returned to normal. " The masses found themselves deprived of any possibilities for effective and direct intervention. Once again they became mere spectators. This collapse of the opposition occurred on the eve of the 1976 "shunto. " Shunto is the spring offensive of the trade unions, which has become traditional. The first one occurred in 1956, when 800, 000 trade unionists went on strike. In 1964 some 6.5 million workers were involved; the figure rose to 8.44 million in 1973.
In 1974, if account is taken of the non-unionized workers, the total number of participants was on the order of 20 million. The Shunto is thus a great moment of annual trade-union action. In 1976 it had the possibility of combining trade-union demands with an anti-government political offensive. But the attitude adopted by the SP and CP deprived the 1976 shunto of all perspective and outlet. In spite of its growing breadth, the 1975 shunto had already been a failure. The effects of the recession and the end of the economic boom were seriously felt, and the bourgeoisie formed a common front to reject wage increases of more than 15 percent. The spring strikes, which had become routine and traditonal, were unable to overcome the resistance of the determined employers. The previously granted accords were terIn 1976 the government set a 10 percent ceiling on wage increases, which amounted to a decline in the real purchasing power of the masses, inflation being greater than 10 percent. The loss of political initiative on the part of the SP and CP, due to their own cowardice, was reflected on the trade-union terrain in the marginalization of Sohyo. The transport strike of the first day was massively followed in vain, for the rightwing trade unions took the lead in the negotiations. It was the International Metalworkers Federation-Japanese Commission (IMF-JC) that set the pace. This "federation" includes independent unions, members of Domei or even the right wing of Sohyo. Founded in 1967, it had 794,000 members in 1973 and is tending to play an increasingly important role. Once the agreement was signed between the employers and the IMF-JC, the die was cast. The 10 percent ceiling was not overcome. What solution to the crisis? This second consecutive defeat for Sohyo places the authority of the leadership within the union seriously in question. The trade-union bureaucracy of the SP is well aware of this and has initiated a sweeping repression against the most militant sections of the rank and file. Several "youth commissions" of the Sohyo, where the influence of Trotskyist militants is sometimes large, have been suspended. But it is on the political terrain that the most pressing battles are looming. The Japanese far left has been unable to play an active: national role in the evolution of events. From the open,ing of the crisis, the Japan Revolutionary Communist League, Japanese section of the Fourth International, called for a CP-SP-Sohyo united front to overthrow the Miki government. (See the JRCL resolution published in INPRECOR, No.51, May 13, 1976.) But the political degeneration of a good part of the far left of the 1960s is being sadly felt today. The semispontanéist Bund current has disintegrated, giving rise to aberrant phenomena such as the "Japanese Red Army." The Chukaku (revolutionary faction) of the major organization of the end of the 1960s is now engaged in an interminable internecine war with two other far-left formations, the Kakumaru (Central Nucleus) and Kairo (Liberation). The uchigeba ("internecine wars" among the various far-left groups) have already cost the lives of several dozen militants and the Chukaku has been reduced to a virtually clandestine paramilitary existence. A process of recomposition of the far left is going on, but in the present situation it is inevitably proceeding slowly. The large reformist parties have a free hand to give in to the pressures of the government. The extreme legalism of the Japanese Communist party was highlighted when Tanaka was arrested. That very day the party was holding a special congress to officially abandon the terms "dictatorship of the proletariat" and "Marxism-Leninism" (the latter replaced by "scientific socialism"). The shock generated by the indictment of the former prime minister was great; it made possible the new rise of mass action for the overthrow of the LDP government. Nevertheless, Kenji Miyamoto, major leader of the CP, explained from the congress podium that Miki ought to remain in office in order to complete the inquiry. The cowardice of the reformist parties enabled the bourgeoisie to come through a difficult phase. But the crisis of the system is too deep to be surmounted that easily. The LDP hopes to carry off a majority once again in the next elections, but the employers are nonethe less preparing for the inevitable: the establishment of a coalition government. The CP and the left of the SP (which holds the majority in both the party and Sohyo) are seeking to put forward a solution patterned after the French Union de la Gauche (Union of the Left, the. CP-SP bloc), which would be capable of being broadened to include bourgeois formations. Moreover, the group composed of Kono's LDP split-off, Komei, the Democratic Socialist party, and the right-wing of the SP is preparing a "center-left" government that would include at least a part of the LDP. In order to do this they have created a formation called Society to Think About a New Japan. It is in this direction that the Japanese bourgeoisie appears to be leaning today. In the meantime, the bourgeoisie has to clear the hurdle of the coming elections to the Diet. To do this the leadership of the LDP has to be welded together at the next party congress. Miki will very likely not be the man of the hour at that congress. Such, at least, is the view of Charles Smith, editorialist of the Financial Times, who wrote on September 13: "Mr. Miki may be a popular figure, but he does not have the lines of communication to big business which a prime minister still needs to raise the thousands of millions of yen the LDP needs at election time. Neither does he have the authority within the party to perform the tricky task of allocating constituencies between rival factions." September 30, 1976
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The article below is a contribution to the discussion in the world revolutionary movement of the historical significance and role of Mao Tse-tung and Maoism. It was written by S.S. Wu, a rev-
Political Crisis, " published in INPRECOR, Nos.55, July 8, 1976, and 56, July 22, 1976. The present article will be printed in two parts. The section below deals with Mao's role in the victory of the third Chinese revolution, which culminated in the Communist party's seizure of power in 1949. The second section, which will appear in the next issue of INPRECOR, deals with Mao's conception of the building of socialism and the cultural revolution of the 1960s and offers an assessment of the end of the Mao era. The quotations from Mao that occur in the text are the author's translations from the