July 14 — It’s hard to keep track of how many prime ministers (PM) Japan has had over the past five years. One after another has been dumped or given up because, like their U.S. counterparts, the country’s politicians have no solution to economic stagnation, poverty and underemployment. Voters handed Naoto Kan, the latest PM, a serious blow last Sunday as his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) lost control of the upper house of parliament in national elections.
Much like the U.S. voters who placed blind faith in Obama’s promises of real change — national health care, bringing troops home, etc. — Japanese voters wanted to believe in the promises made by the DPJ to end corruption, unemployment, and obsequious adherence to U.S. diplomatic policies. On the surface this seems like yet another blow to the international working class. But with a communist analysis the “failure” of the DPJ can provide an opportunity to expose the bosses’ electoral shell game for the sham that it is and organize workers for communist revolution, the only real alternative to the horrors of capitalism.
Last September they voted the old ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), out of power, and for the first time since the end of World War II they voted in a new ruling party, the DPJ, whose leader Yukio Hatoyama, became the new prime minister. To stimulate the economy, Hatoyama had promised an end to exorbitant highway tolls and to provide cash subsidies to families with children. The DPJ had also promised to renegotiate a 2006 agreement with the Pentagon to transfer the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station (with 4,000 marines) near Naha to the Henoko district of Nago city, a more remote spot on the island of Okinawa. The agreement was worked out as a “response” to mass demonstrations against the Marine Corps after a brutal kidnap and rape of a twelve-year-old girl by three marines in 1995. Like Obama, Hatoyama has backtracked on all of these campaign promises.
In the fall 2009 election that brought Hatoyama to power, his party’s candidates on Okinawa won seats in parliament by promising to fight to get the base entirely removed from Okinawa. There was even talk of moving all the marines to Guam, where the Pentagon is planning a major expansion of facilities with the enthusiastic support of liberal U.S. Democrats like Hawaii’s Neil Abercrombie. On April 25, more than 90,000 people demonstrated in Okinawa against all the bases there. (More than half of the 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan are based in Okinawa.)
Ignoring popular demand and the plight of a fellow “liberal party,” the Obama cabinet adopted hardball tactics, attacking individual Japanese leaders and using the “North Korean threat” to publicly justify the military build-up in Northeast Asia to counter the Chinese build-up. Hatoyama caved in to the U.S. political assault and reneged on his promises regarding Okinawa. These failures caused a split in his own party, and he was forced to resign as prime minister in June, to be replaced by a middle-of-the-road party hack, Naoto Kan.
There are many complex issues involved in these developments. We see the bankruptcy of bourgeois electoral politics and the collusion of the far right (open fascists, the LDP) and the liberal upstarts.
We see the arrogance of the U.S. imperialists and the priority they place on maintaining an arc of bases facing their Chinese rivals. It is an open secret that U.S.-South Korean military exercises, including a U.S. Navy nuclear sub, threatening North Korea, were the real cause of the recent sinking of a South Korean destroyer. North Korea seems to be on the verge of collapse and, pushed by the Chinese imperialists, the country has fully moved to a market economy.
We also see blatant racism against Okinawans and other super-exploited Asian workers, including utter disregard for the needs of the people of Guam and North Korea by the imperialist powers.
As earlier CHALLENGE articles have pointed out, neither electoral politics nor the weak-kneed revisionist parties like the Japanese “Communist” Party (JCP) or the Social Democratic Party (SDP) have any answer for the economic and social crisis in Japan, much less the threat of imperialist war.
The Japanese workers and youth need a clear revolutionary communist line like that of PLP. They have to rid themselves of confused ideas about nationalism and patriotism and the illusion that small reforms — moving a base instead of getting rid of all U.S. and native imperialists — can lead to positive and lasting changes.
