Japanese Communist revival

[A.J.]

I remember when I was a kid all you ever heard about Japan in the media was that it was some sort of consumer capitalist paradise where all the workers were madly, deeply in love with their bosses.

Obviously behind the glitzy neon facade there lurks altogether different, harsher reality.......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uubkOYAwi9M&feature=related

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Well, it's just too bad the JCP are eurocommunist. :(

They've maintained fairly steady electoral support through the years.

[KurtFF8]

From what I understand, they did quite poorly in the last elections though

[Adi Shankara]

The Japanese are starting to embrace communism again, albeit slowly...and indeed, it's starting in the Universities, with the youth, where most communist revolutions have their seeds...

For example, see how popular the work of Karl Marx has become in Manga form (a great idea--it makes his ideas more available and accessible to the people when put in cartoon form, so the basic idea gets across--the most serious of students can then read his unabridged works if they are still interested):

"TOKYO--When Karl Marx alerted economists to the “the knell of capitalist private property” he probably didn’t imagine the phrase cropping-up as a speech bubble in a comic strip for Japanese commuters.
But across the world’s second biggest economy, bookstores from Hiroshima to Hokkaido are preparing for what they expect to be the publishing phenomenon of the year: Das Kapital – the manga version.
The comic, which goes on sale early next month, plays into a growing fascination among Japan’s hard-working labour force with socialist literature and joins a collection of increasingly fierce literary critiques of the global capitalist system.
In recent decades, while Japan Inc was still delivering collective prosperity to the nation, public criticism of companies has been muted. Unions were weak and acquiescent. But now, as the country sinks into its second recession in seven year, the sackings begin and the gap widens between rich and poor, a growing number of Japanese believe the problem lies with capitalism itself.



The ambitious comic rendering of Das Kapital is designed to parcel the complex economic theories of Marx’s hefty original in a format which Japanese adore digesting their information from; it will also be compressed into a size that can be slipped discretely into a Chanel evening bag, or slid into the top drawer of a desk when the bosses are looking. A sneak preview given to The Times reveals that Marx’s central themes are relayed in the comic via a cast of suitably down-trodden workers.
Japanese publishers have historically used cartoons to explain thorny diplomatic relations with China, advanced wine-tasting and even the spread of bird flu: the manga version of Das Kapital takes on even the toughest concepts thrown up in the original, from “commodity fetishism” to the precise process by which “the expropriators are expropriated”.
The comic is expected to sell tens of thousands of copies in its first weeks on sale, but is up against stiff competition: anti-capitalist books are the hottest sellers in capitalist Japan at the moment, and it will take something extraordinary to beat the sales of Hideki Mitani’s “Greedy Capitalism and the Self Destructiveness of Wall Street.”
A former Goldman Sachs high-flyer, Mr Mitani now vigorously deplores the destruction of Japanese business values on the altar of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and describes Wall Street itself as one of Dante’s circles of hell. Phrases like “unbridled mammonism” and “uncontrolled greed” abound in his work. Japanese readers, meanwhile, are lapping it up, and the book has become the fastest-selling non-fiction title for many years.
The dramatic shift to the left in Japanese literary tastes has even revived domestic socialist tracts of the 1930s: one of the strongest selling books of the year, at nearly half a million copies, is Kanikosen - a savagely bleak, novel depicting violence, exploitation and revolution aboard a crabmeat canning ship.
The book has somehow pinched a nerve in 21st Century Japan. When Kanikosen was reprinted earlier this year, Tokyo’s largest bookshop put a poster at the front of the store reading: “Revival of the book that describes the cruel labour environment of the past: an environment similar to that of the current working poor in 2008.”
Daisuke Asao, a senior officer in the National Confederation of Trades Unions, said of Japan’s resurgent interest in socialist literature: “the situation of those labourers in the book is very similar to modern temporary workers: the unpredictable contracts, the working under heavy supervision, violence from supervisors, the widespread sexual harassment and the pressure against unionisation are all things that modern Japanese recognise every day."


when Japan begins to go Communist, you know it's the beginning of the end of a consumer, capitalist culture as we know it! good riddance!

[Zeus the Moose]

From what I understand, they did quite poorly in the last elections though

The JCP did lose a little bit on the party-list vote, but remained stagnant in terms of seats (not sure how their vote in the single member constituencies compares to the previous election). So I'm not sure I'd call their result "quite poor," but it's probably not what they would have hoped, especially considering this apparent influx of membership.

The main electoral strength of the JCP, however, does seem to be on the more local level. In regional and municipal elections, many candidates will run as independents, or the DPJ and LDP will end up supporting the same candidate, leaving the JCP has the only (or at least primary) opposition.

[A.J.]

Well, it's just too bad the JCP are eurocommunist. :(

They've maintained fairly steady electoral support through the years.

I'm aware the JCP are right-revisionist but that's sort of irrelevant to the broader point I was trying to make that growing numbers of young working class people in Japan are becoming discontent with capitalism.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I remember when I was a kid all you ever heard about Japan in the media was that it was some sort of consumer capitalist paradise where all the workers were madly, deeply in love with their bosses.Nothing like 15+ years of recession to disabuse people from their illusions in the system. A year or so ago I remember reading that a Marxist novel from the 1920s had become a surprise bestseller in Japan.

I think the US is seeing a similar thing starting. Polls show that 30% of people under 30 are at least friendly to (democratic) socialist ideas. That's pretty significant considering that these ideas get no mainstream hearing other than to be denounced by both mainstream parties.

If we go into a double-dip recession (likely) or just remain at low growth and high unemployment the initial questioning of neo-liberal orthodoxy that we can kind of see now will harden for more people and they will begin not only to question the idea that capitalism works for workers but also how to fight the system's attacks and even change it.

[Dr Mindbender]

i wonder if the JCP's lack of gains are in any way connected to poor national relations with the DPRK.

[Black Sheep]

0:50 there's the red power ranger in the crowd

[pdcrofts]

The lost decade and the end of guaranteed jobs for life through the salaryman system may have made Japanese people disillusioned with capitalism, but they seem to have little other choice. From the outside, Japan appears tightly bound to the capitalist system. Japanese society is very rigid and looks like a strait jacket in many ways, and when people break out, they do so in spectacular fashion. For instance the horrible tragedy of the sarin gas subway attack (unconnected to left-wingers, I know). If that's the level of rebellion, then any revolutionary groups born out of a Japanese lurch to communism may be very formidable indeed.