JAPAN: Unity Is Purple

Japan’s Socialists, split into left and right wings by the peace treaty with the Western allies, patched things up last week. Amid bouquets of chrysanthemums, carnations and ferns, the two factions joined to become Japan’s second largest political party, with 155 seats in the Diet v. 185 for Premier Ichiro Hatoyama’s conservative Democrats.

The Socialists came to windy settlements of many differences, from party dues to rearmament policy, in the end settled everything except the color of the party’s flag. Both sides, the blue-flag right-wingers and red-flag left-wingers, wanted time to consider the logical compromise—purple. The left-wingers, non-Communist but not always discernibly so in foreign-policy issues, promised to quit calling Japan an “American colony,” and to postpone their campaign for disbanding Japan’s modest armed forces.

In return, the left-wingers got the chairmanship of the new united party for their leader, Mosaburo Suzuki, a onetime ricksha boy, a poet who writes under the name of Mojin (growing person), a pacifist who did 2½ years’ time in imperial jails during World War II, a longtime inhabitant of the marshy Marxist terrain between Socialism and Communism. For their part, the right-wingers installed as party secretary general their boss, Inejiro Asanuma, a big-chested, big-voiced union man who has a background of antiCommunism. He is a stronger, more forceful type than Party Chairman Suzuki. The reunited party’s line: preservation of the MacArthur Constitution (which outlaws war), nationalization of some industries (e.g., coal, electric power), diplomatic relations with Red China and the Soviet Union, gradual steps toward replacing the Japan-U.S. military alliance with some sort of pact between Japan, the U.S., China and Russia.

The reunion upset the balance in the Diet, but was likely to provoke a similar reunion between Hatoyama’s Democrats and the Liberals of Ex-Premier Shigeru Yoshida, which would give conservatives a 147-seat majority and Japan the near equivalent of a two-party system.