Japan’s Socialists Ease Stand on Defense Issues

Japan’s Socialist Party on Monday backed away from its call for dismantling the country’s military forces and ending its security treaty with the United States.

The major policy shift represented an effort to attract other opposition parties to a coalition with the Socialists, Japan’s largest opposition party.

Tsuruo Yamaguchi, secretary general of the Socialists, also said his party won’t seek any drastic changes in the country’s capitalist economic policies.

He said the Socialists would accept the existence “for the time being” of Japan’s Self Defense Forces but would continue to advocate peace and disarmament.

He said the party would seek only a gradual reduction of U.S. bases in Japan, where 64,000 U.S. troops are stationed.

Yamaguchi told party regional officials that the policy changes are aimed at creating an alliance with other opposition groups, which have criticized the party’s past platform as unrealistic.

Chairwoman Takako Doi said she had met with leaders of three other non-Communist opposition parties and they had agreed to work together while respecting each other’s policies.

All Oppose Tax

The parties--the Buddhist-affiliated Clean Government Party, the Democratic Socialist Party and the United Social Democratic Party--are unified in their opposition to an unpopular new consumption tax that the Liberal Democrats pushed through Parliament. However, they disagree on a range of other issues, including nuclear power and relations with North Korea and South Korea.

Until Monday, the Socialists had opposed the mutual security treaty with the United States and the Self Defense Forces, which they said violated a constitutional ban on maintenance of land, sea and air forces. Japanese courts have interpreted the constitution as allowing defensive military forces.

Under Doi’s leadership, the Socialists emerged as the biggest winner in elections last month for Parliament’s upper house.

Opposition parties now hold a majority of seats in the upper chamber and hope to eliminate the governing Liberal Democratic Party’s majority in the lower house in general elections that must be held by July.