[Today marks a decade since the death of Japanese communist
Toshiko Karasawa. Her courageous life is a testament to the
revolutionary potential of anti-imperialism, but also the difficult
choices faced by the Left in US client states. ]
[[link removed]]

HOW A YOUNG COMMUNIST WON AND LOST POWER IN POSTWAR JAPAN  
[[link removed]]


 

Chris Dite
December 2, 2023
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Today marks a decade since the death of Japanese communist Toshiko
Karasawa. Her courageous life is a testament to the revolutionary
potential of anti-imperialism, but also the difficult choices faced by
the Left in US client states. _

Japanese communist leader Kyuichi Tokuda places his ballot in an
election box, April 16, 1946. Several of his supporters stand behind
him., Bettmann / Getty Images

 

In 1946, the_ New York Times_ reported that Toshiko Karasawa, a
thirty-six-year-old typist, was leading miners into battle against
bosses in the coal pits of Hokkaido, a prefecture on the northernmost
tip of Japan’s main island chain. Erroneously, the paper framed the
movement behind Karasawa as a product of democratic reforms mandated
by the US military occupation. But this confusion was not without some
basis in reality. Japan’s Communists, of which Karasawa was one,
were motivated by their opposition to their country’s imperialism,
which they believed kept in place a reactionary elite whose grip on
power was weakened by America’s military might.

Despite her brief renown in the early postwar days, Karasawa, who died
ten years ago today, has now been almost completely forgotten.
Remarkable for her courageous confrontation with fascism and big
business, Karasawa became a symbol of the tragic role of the Japanese
Communist Party, which was unable to reconcile its attempts to
increase worker power with its opposition to the reactionary elements
of its society and US imperialism.

The Meiji Road to Militarism

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan’s ruling class became
worried about the threat of colonization by the west. China’s
humiliation at the hands of Great Britain during the opium wars and
the American naval officer Mathew Perry’s demand that Japan should
open itself up to trade to the West in 1853 pressed home the need to
exert influence within the region.

Japan’s elites saw the Tokugawa shogunate, which had been in place
since 1603, as incapable of responding to the threats the country
faced. However, unlike its counterpart in France, the
Japanese _ancien régime_, which had for over two centuries enshrined
a feudal hierarchy in which a samurai class (approximately 6 percent
of the population) extracted a surplus from a peasantry, was pushed to
reform not by mass popular resistance, but by internal challenges.

The 1868 Meiji Restoration was the start of a decades-long process of
institutional modernization, militarization, and industrialization.
Rather than allowing foreign capital to dominate Japanese industry,
the new government created a slew of state-owned enterprises that it
sold to businessmen, previously one of the lowest-ranked members of
Japan’s feudal class system. This facilitated the rise of
the _zaibatsu _— huge cartels helmed by individual families and
financed by banks with close ties to them. Many of these Japanese
capitalists emerged from the former shogunate’s privileged samurai
layer.

Industrialization soon entailed and enabled a series of military
victories, against China’s Qing Dynasty in 1895 and Tsarist Russia
in 1905, which impressed and appalled the European imperial powers in
equal measure. But the modernization that transformed Japan into a
regional power also provoked a backlash at home from former samurai
unable to profit from the new system, as well as a wider layer of
society, including the peasantry and military.

Obsessed with the threat of Westernization-by-stealth, they were
resentful of _zaibatsu _monopolism and the relatively liberal ideas
of the new intelligentsia, who mainly came from _zaibatsu_ families.
Draped in Tokugawa period costumes, but espousing a mess of
twentieth-century ideas foreign to that era, this elite-peasant
alliance built an ultranationalist movement that challenged big
business for dominance of domestic politics. By the 1930s, even if it
wasn’t in their original business plans, the _zaibatsu _had
pragmatically fallen behind their expansionist military project.

A Capitalist Cataclysm

Outflanked by an elite that rallied behind the flag, the Japanese
labor movement subsequently came under severe attack. In the 1930s,
Toshiko Karasawa was a Communist Party (JCP) member in her early
twenties, working as a typist at a Hokkaido office. There she
simultaneously organized workers and their families at the
Mitsubishi _zaibatsu_’s Bibai coal mine. Through her union work she
was elected to a trade union council in Sapporo, the prefecture’s
capital.

Outflanked by an elite that rallied behind the flag, the Japanese
labor movement subsequently came under severe attack.

The 1931 Manchurian incident — a false flag operation Japan used as
a pretext to invade northern China — deeply divided left leaders. As
in Europe, imperialism created divisions within the Left. Thirty years
before the Manchurian incident, the German Social Democrat Eduard
Bernstein had offered up a defense of colonialism, arguing that “the
higher culture always has the greater right on its side over the
lower.” Japanese social democrats were of this mindset — they felt
imperial expansion could alleviate the domestic effects of the Great
Depression. Imperialism was opposed much more vehemently by Japan’s
radical left, who were internationalists as well as socialists.

Karasawa and her comrades saw in expansionism only disaster for the
region. A United States intelligence file on the Japanese left
reported that

unlike the social democrats, the Japanese communists [have] responded
to the Manchurian incident with immediate and unqualified
denunciation. In their propaganda, the workers were exhorted to refuse
to produce weapons or transport soldiers to the front; the soldiers,
to turn their weapons against their rulers and leaders and to
fraternize with the Chinese soldiers; and the people in general, to
fight for the immediate evacuation of Mukden, as well as all other
occupied areas, and for the immediate recall of Japanese troops.

As a prominent union leader, Karasawa was vulnerable. Government
repression — in the form of arrests, torture, assassinations and
executions — escalated after the invasion of Manchuria. Karasawa was
repeatedly arrested, but escaped each time with her life. Unlike many
of her comrades, she did not participate in the mass conversion of
Marxists “to the national cause.”

When imperial Japan finally surrendered in 1945, the Communists’
predictions of catastrophe were validated. Close to a million
civilians had died in the Allied bombing campaigns, and millions more
made homeless. The damage to infrastructure was immense, and the
entire population — particularly in the major cities — was at
near-starvation levels. Many _zaibatsu_, having lost their lucrative
military contracts, sabotaged the economy by shutting down production.
Unemployment and inflation wreaked havoc.

Adding to the pressure on resources, millions of Japanese abroad —
both soldiers, and civilians who had nothing to do with the war
[[link removed]] —
were being repatriated. A 1946 news report
[[link removed]] shows
Toshiko Karasawa urging the newly repatriated to become politically
active to improve their conditions. The destitution and the shellshock
on the refugees’ faces is visible in images from the era.

Exploiters Eat Well

After defeating Japan and preventing it from wresting control over the
Pacific, the United States embarked on an effort to transform the
island nation into a crucial xxxxxx against communism. General
Douglas MacArthur — Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP)
— sought to cement this status through the simultaneous maintenance
of the emperor system alongside semi-democratization.

After defeating Japan and preventing it from wresting control over the
Pacific, the United States embarked on an effort to transform the
island nation into a crucial xxxxxx against communism.

But liberalization also produced challenges to the government American
aimed to establish. Communists poured out of prisons, and millions
joined now-legal unions. The working class began to flex its muscle on
the economic and political fronts. Working people engaged in
widespread strikes, slowdowns, and production takeovers to deal
with _zaibatsu_ sabotage. In April 1946, they elected Toshiko
Karasawa to the National Diet as a member of the Communist Party.

SCAP had engineered a strange kind of democratic stage for Karasawa to
appear on. Many of her opponents in the Diet were members of the same
networks that had dragged the country into catastrophe. The prime
minister, Baron Kijūrō Shidehara, for example, belonged to the
Mitsubishi _zaibatsu_ family that had ordered Karasawa’s arrest
during the war. These forces aimed to prevent any socialization of
industry, and felt they had the support of the US occupying forces
behind them. Just three days before Karasawa was elected, for example,
US troops had used jeeps armed with machine guns to break up a crowd
of fifty thousand workers besieging Shidehara’s residence demanding
food and jobs.

Karasawa’s first words in the Diet startled those present. In a
hearing on the “Resolution to promote the repatriation of overseas
compatriots and demobilized personnel,” she attacked
the _zaibatsu_, linking them to her country’s embrace of
imperialism:

In the years since the Manchurian incident, Japan has engaged in wars
of imperialism and aggression, sent many of our compatriots to the
front lines, and killed millions of our own people . . . the
militarists might be superficially out of sight, but we cannot trust
the _zaibatsu_ and bureaucrats that colluded with them and profited
from these wars. . . . Unless the entire political system is
democratized, and this system placed in the hands of our people, these
problems cannot be solved.

As Karasawa’s speech continued, the jeers grew louder. One enraged
conservative politician rushed the podium and attempted to drag her
away. The incident propelled her to nationwide fame, a position from
which she attacked the influence of big business in the Diet. In a
later session on the welfare budget, Karasawa
targeted _zaibatsu_ hypocrisy, pointing out the injustice of their
wealth amid a Japan still plagued by poverty. “Those who don’t
work and still eat well today made huge profits exploiting the people,
while the workers they conscripted into the war effort starve to
death.”

From a position of nationwide fame, Karasawa attacked the influence of
big business in the Diet.

This was not hyperbole. Sitting across from Karasawa was Yoshinari
Kawai, minister of health and welfare by imperial elect, and
soon-to-be president of Komatsu Ltd., which had made tremendous
profits during the war through military contracts. Kawai purred
evasive answers at Karasawa, blaming the looming shadow of reparations
for the people’s poor living standards.

A further undemocratic element Karasawa faced was the strict ban on
criticizing the occupation. SCAP troops were terrorizing the Japanese
civilian population daily through beatings, sexual assault, and
murder. One practice involved rounding up women and forcing them to
undergo invasive venereal disease examinations. Karasawa used her high
profile to help build a women-led mass movement against these
depredations, carefully targeting the Japanese government as a proxy
for MacArthur’s forces. SCAP got the message, but dismissed the
mobilizations, declaring “it is up to us how to decide how to treat
the women rounded up. You have no right to say anything about it.”

A Contest for Power

Parliamentary tactics alone were clearly ineffective in the face of
SCAP’s dictatorial powers and big business domination of the Diet.
In reality the specter of a socialist reconstruction failed to
materialize.

For months, workers had been increasing their control over production
in strategic industries. Having seized control of their worksites,
mining, transport, and other workers were functionally in charge of
much Japan’s economy. The practices of these myriad worksites
differed, but from bread-and-butter economic demands they had begun
progressing to think about societal transformation. So widespread was
this practice, that a national Struggle Committee against the
Suppression of Production Control was formed. By some estimates, a
total nationwide seizure of coal mines by workers was possible by the
spring of 1946.

Karasawa’s voter base — the coal mining families of Hokkaido —
led the most radical of these production control fights. But while she
rhetorically supported the production control struggle, Karasawa and
her comrades made no attempt to develop this national base for a
revolutionary seizure of power. Instead, they focused on leveraging
workers’ growing power to cajole other left parties into forming a
left-of-center coalition government. In hindsight, their choice to
take the conciliatory path might seem motivated by a justified fear of
US retaliation. However, the more immediate motivation for the
reformist outlook of the JCP was that its leadership maintained a
misguided but genuine hope in the United States’ openness to a
progressive reconstruction. As historian Joe Moore argues,

It was one of the ironies of the time that even while workers at the
enterprise level were moving toward a contest for power at the point
of production, the leadership of the left was moving in the opposite
direction.

By the time of a proposed general strike in February 1947, it was
clear the left leadership had made a fatal miscalculation. Firstly,
conditions were not as ripe as they had been months earlier. And in
any case, the question now seemed less about the possibility of a
socialist reconstruction, and more the nature of the inevitable
capitalist one. But even on this less contentious point, SCAP was
prepared to crush union attempts to destabilize the right-wing
government. Holding key union leaders hostage on the eve of the
general strike, SCAP forced them to call it off.

Despite the strength of workers’ power in the immediate postwar
years, the cost of wielding it was too high for the Japanese left to
countenance. Instead, the JCP clung dogmatically to the notion that
the US occupation would complete the “progressive” bourgeois
revolution begun during the Meiji Restoration. This provided an
ideological justification for not taking advantage of the moment.
Rather than a socialist reconstruction, Japan commenced its role as a
client state of the United States, and a crucial pillar in the
latter’s long-standing Asia-Pacific dominance.

A Mixed Legacy

The chaos on the Left in the subsequent years reflects the resulting
despair. Scolded by the Cominform first for a lack of adventurism in
1950, then for too much of it five years later, the JCP veered left
and right over the next decades. It purged, then readmitted, members
like Karasawa, depending on which faction was in charge, what commands
had been issued from Moscow, or what theoretical turn dominated at the
time.

The JCP, clinging dogmatically to the notion that the US occupation
would complete the ‘progressive’ bourgeois revolution begun during
the Meiji Restoration, proved incapable of taking advantage of the
moment.

By the 1970s, the prospects of an internationalist socialist
revolution seemed further away than ever. Karasawa, like many
disillusioned but unapologetic communists of her generation,
gravitated toward the _teikei,_ cooperative movement, and grassroots
antinuclear campaigning.

Despite the JCP’s reputation for internal harshness, Karasawa and
many of her comrades were driven by a humanism that seems almost
sentimental by today’s standards. Memoirs from their contemporaries
are filled with stories not just of ferocious confrontation with the
police and big business, but with touching acts of kindness. More than
one recounts how Communist union leaders broke down in tears while
ordering their members to retreat during the production control
struggles. Whatever Karasawa and her comrades’ exact motivation to
back down, their decision helped cement Japan’s role in assuring the
United States’ regional hegemony. As the Biden administration looks
to push forward with a pivot to Asia in response to the rise of China,
the consequences of this decision are especially relevant.

_CHRIS DITE is a teacher and union member._

_Subscribe to JACOBIN [[link removed]] today, get
four beautiful editions a year, and help us build a real, socialist
alternative to billionaire media. Donate to Jacobin.
[[link removed]]_

* Japan
[[link removed]]
* History
[[link removed]]
* Politics
[[link removed]]
* Cold War
[[link removed]]
* U.S. imperialism
[[link removed]]
* Japanese Communist Party
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]