JAPAN: The Comrade & the Geisha

For five years Japan’s “Little Stalin” was a teak-jawed, cold-eyed ex-factory worker named Shigeo Shida. All other top Communists had fled to China after General MacArthur ordered a crackdown on Communists in 1950. Shida stayed, went underground and took over command by default. A hardened revolutionary with a taste for cold-blooded intrigue and a record of twelve years in prison, Shida built up a strong following among the younger, tougher comrades. He appointed himself chief of the party’s “military committee,” decreed a policy of unflinching violence. “We must always be prepared to give our lives for the party,” he proclaimed. “Communists should never vary.”

But last year the old leaders began creeping back from Red China. Sanzo Nozaka returned, declared himself successor to Party Secretary Kyuichi Tokuda, who had died in Peking in 1953. Nozaka lost no time in cutting Shida down to size. “There has been ultra-leftist adventurism,” he cried, and prescribed a policy of nonviolence and a popular front with the Socialists. Suddenly Shida disappeared. For nearly nine months nothing more was heard of him.

Then, two weeks ago, the party formally expelled Shida for “indulging in individualism,” adding cryptically: “He abandoned his entrusted mission.” Last week the Communist magazine Shinso (Truth) claimed to have discovered the “real facts” about Shida. According to Shinso, all the time Shida had supposedly been performing dark deeds of underground violence, he had really been spending the party’s money “merrymaking with geisha girls,” in the disguise of “Mr. P., a company owner.” Shida had bought himself expensive clothes, donned black-rimmed glasses, grown a big mustache. Sometimes for three nights running he would drink four to six quarts of sake at a Tokyo geisha house called the Big Bamboo. He lavished so much money on his favorite geisha and attendant guests that the owner was able to add a brand-new two-story annex. Wrote Shinso’s reporter: “I looked around at the rich artistic material used in building the annex, and when I reflected it all had been paid for with the money of poor working people, I felt a cold fury pass down my spine.”

If the story was true, Shida had disappeared in order to escape that cold fury. But was it the truth? Comrades loyal to Shida suggested discreetly that the whole thing was a fabrication designed to discredit him politically. If so, it was unlikely that he was still alive. Either way, it was another reminder that Stalins, little or big, are finding it tough all over.