Japan’s Communists Gain Toehold Among Disillusioned

Niichi Kitada is a respectable, affluent 71-year-old biology professor utterly uninterested in revolution and happiest indulging his passion for horses and the tea ceremony. So what is he doing voting for the Japan Communist Party these days?

He used to support the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, but got disgusted with its endless links to corruption. Then he switched to the Socialists until they abruptly upended their principles in 1994 to join the LDP as part of the ruling elite.

“The main reason I vote for the Communists is because they don’t change their policies and they listen to ordinary citizens’ opinions,” Kitada said.

“I don’t want the Communists to become the ruling party because they haven’t been good for the rest of the world--look at the Soviet Union, China and North Korea,” he said. “But they are the only ones we can choose out of the existing political parties since they don’t look for money or [support] vested interests.”

In one of Japan’s more intriguing political trends, sentiments such as Kitada’s are on the increase as the long-marginalized Japan Communist Party broadens its appeal to capture a growing number of unaffiliated, disenchanted voters.

Political analyst Minoru Morita said the party appears to be attracting as many as half of those who abandoned the Socialists in disgust at their policy flip-flops, along with citizen activists and people like Kitada.

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The trend was dramatically illustrated by the victory this month of Communist Yutaka Yano for Komae city mayor in the Tokyo metropolitan district, where non-Communist supporters provided an estimated half of his 10,238 votes.

But it has been building over the past six months with a Communist near-victory in the Kyoto mayoral election, an increase from two to four seats in the Okinawa prefectural assembly and a doubling of votes for a gubernatorial candidate in Saitama prefecture. In addition, the party tripled the votes it received this year over 1995 in Gifu prefecture during a by-election of the House of Councillors, parliament’s upper house.

According to polls by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a leading newspaper, the Communists’ support rating has more than doubled to 5.5% in June from less than 2% in 1994, a conspicuous development amid declining support for most other parties.

The party has steadily increased its seats in local councils to 3,986, the highest level in at least 35 years, and is the only one of the four established parties to register a net gain in local seats since 1993, when the LDP lost its ruling majority and set off a major political realignment. In addition, the party has taken the township heads in 54 localities by allying with nonparty activists.

Analysts such as Takao Toshikawa, editor of the Tokyo Insideline political newsletter, predict that the Communists will double their seats in the House of Representatives, parliament’s lower house, to 30 or more in the next general election. That’s still a pittance among the chamber’s 500 seats, but it could establish them as Japan’s leading leftist opposition party if the Social Democrats, as the Socialists are now called, self-destruct, as is widely predicted.

“To the extent that they can maintain their status as the only real opposition party, I think their support will greatly grow, especially in the large cities,” Morita said of the Communists.

Few, if any, seriously believe that the party will ever become part of a ruling government. And many believe the Communist surge will be quickly short-circuited if a more acceptable political party emerges offering a genuine menu of what analysts are calling “third-pole” policies.

Those policies offer an alternative to the two major establishment forces--the LDP-led coalition government and the New Frontier Party, perceived by many as largely indistinguishable from the LDP. Third-pole policies advocate a more populist governmental system through openness to public scrutiny, greater influence of citizen groups and massive decentralization. They also champion pacifist principles and call for Japan to forthrightly acknowledge and apologize for its war deeds.

“In short, the third-pole vision calls for more thoroughgoing, populist institutional reforms than the more elitist and technocratic deregulation favored by Japan’s neoconservatives,” University of Hawaii scholar Lonny E. Carlile recently wrote in a paper for the Japan Policy Research Institute.

Carlile had in mind a coalition including Social Democrats, liberal elements formerly associated with the LDP and citizen activist groups--not the Communists. But Yano, the telegenic 49-year-old Komae mayor who is the nation’s only Communist city head, says such views are precisely what he offers.

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A Komae City Council member for 21 years, Yano defeated candidates backed by the LDP and Social Democrats to replace a mayor who had suddenly disappeared under a cloud of suspicion involving corruption and gambling debts. He bridged differences with non-Communist supporters by promising an investigation into corruption; increased support for small businesses and the elderly, disabled and weak; and more open government proceedings.

“The election was not a Communist election but an election of local citizens taking the initiative,” Yano said in a telephone interview. He added that he hopes to inspire more alliances with nonparty supporters nationwide by proving through his administration that Communists are not “frightening” but interested in such “reasonable” issues as welfare and environmental protection.

“More and more people are losing trust in politics and getting irritated,” the Tokyo Shimbun, a newspaper, wrote after Yano’s election. It added that many of its readers are saying, “I want to vote for the Japan Communist Party even just once in my life.”

Party Chairman Tetsuzo Fuwa said more Japanese are responding to the party’s fundamental message that “the people are sovereign.” That stance compelled members to oppose the emperor before World War II and the U.S. military presence after Japan’s defeat, on the grounds that both forced their country into a subservient position that still persists.

Today, those views translate into support for Okinawa Gov. Masahide Ota’s refusal to renew land leases for U.S. military facilities; opposition to a planned 5% consumption tax increase; and a campaign for shorter working hours.

The party also argues that banks, rather than taxpayers, should bail out failed housing loan firms--a popular message delivered by Kazuo Shii, the party’s secretary-general, who comes across on television as “moderate, sophisticated and quite persuasive,” as analyst Toshikawa put it.

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Even rivals admit that the Communists seem to be the cleanest party in Japan, the only one to refuse corporate donations. And many members come across like Shii and Fuwa: smart, articulate, direct and media savvy.

Even as the party decries “American imperialism and Japanese monopolistic capitalists,” for instance, Fuwa takes pains to praise U.S. progressive policies in antitrust law, labor rights and election reform.

“Of course, we are very critical of the security treaty and military bases, but we have a lot to learn from American history,” Fuwa said in an interview. He added that U.S.-Japan relations have been characterized by either hostility or Japanese subservience and that it is time to replace current security arrangements with a friendship treaty based on equality.

Such views have a growing following among the young, a group the Communists plan to target. But Toshikawa said the party could expand its appeal even further if it would change its name.

“The current daily policies of the JCP are not Communist policies,” Toshikawa said. “If they changed their name, there is no doubt they could get many more seats.”

But Fuwa said the party would keep its name not only because members are proud of it but because the Communists’ consistency is precisely why they are gaining new supporters.

He may be right, judging from voters such as one 69-year-old Tokyo masseur. In the course of a few years, one politician in his district quit. Another bolted the LDP for the New Frontier Party. Still another abandoned the Social Democratic Party for the LDP.

“No one has any fundamental policies anymore,” said the man, who would give only his last name, Yagi. “I’m thinking of voting Communist next time.”