FOREIGN7 Days 8th December 1971

JA P A N : The plot to whitewash Hirohito

How the US saved a Criminal Emperorb y Jon H a llid a y

he spent part of his childhood in China where he once met Chou En-lai at a lunch given by an Episcopalian Bishop. "All I can remember is that we had

history: how the Japanese ruling class prepared itself for “defeat” in 1945. Bergamini details the role played by one o f the key members of the royal family, Prince Higashikuni, in leading the sur­render cabinet. He shows the skilful way in which an old im­perialist insider, Yoshida, was fab­ricated into a clean “pro-Western anti-militarist” to emerge as the postwar strongman in Japanese politics. This is absolutely excellent.Israelis Study Pearl Harbour

The book documents the link between the Imperial military and the postwar Japanese military, the so-called “Self-Defence Forces”. Bergamini points out that several key Japanese military leaders con­tinued on active duty after the 1945 surrender, working with Chiang Kai-shek in China, and then with Haile Selassie in Ethiopia (pp. 113, 325, 1046); others went into the Self-Defence Forces at their inception. How much continuity did Bergamini think there was? We asked him.

“Oh, a great deal. Nakasone, who was in charge of the Self-Defence Forces until this summer was a real member of the Strike-North faction, and was involved in the overthrow of the Hatoyama government in 1957. Tojo’s son is in there, and the sons of half a dozen famous generals, and the Self-Defence Forces don’t feel much of a break with the past. The man who was head of the Historical

Francine Winhamthese beautiful Peking persimonns in front of us" he said. Bergamini has written works on mathematics, astro nomy, and the philosophy of science.

Section in 1965 said to me quite frankly: ‘We have a tre­mendous backlog of plans here to work with because we had such good contingency planning before the war’ — and they do; they have warehouses full of old records — and that’s why they call it the Historical Section, because they have all the contingency plans there! Did you know, for example, that before the 6-Day War a group of Israeli officers came and studied at the Defence Bureau in Tokyo for three weeks, to go over the in­telligence diversions used before Pearl Harbour?”

Japanese ExpansionismWe pointed out that although

the Japanese government claimed not to have expansionist plans, many of its neighbours are highly alarmed. Bergamini replied: ‘When I was over in Tokyo I asked a lot of people about this, and they all agreed that factory Japan was far too vulnerable for there to be any real militarism. Even the most nationalistic of them look to ex­panding Japan’s empire through economic means. I asked a repre­sentative of this line if they mightn’t be able to control the politics of, say Indonesia, through economic means. And he said, ‘That is a possibility. Far in the future, but still it is a possibility.’ And so I asked him what about Japanese immigration. And he said, ‘Well, if we can control politics through economic

matters, then we can certainly adjust trade barriers’.

We asked Bergamini if he could explain the violent reactions from Reischauer and Storry.

“Reischauer and I used to be pretty good friends. But he decided this was a dreadful thing I was doing. He refused to read the book in manuscript. He wrote a threatening letter to my publishers before it came out. He did several other things, and in September he conferred with the Japanese Ambassador in Washington, and proceeded to write a series of letters to influential Japanese. I saw one of these, in which Reischauer said: I have conferred with Ushiba (the Japanese Ambassa­dor) and we have agreed that this book is a serious matter calling for joint action. You know, it’s really unbelievable.” “Why did he get so angry?

“Well, he’s married to the grand­daughter of genro Matsukata a Finance Minister during the buil­ding up of Japanese power, for a start. He has much more wealth tied up in the Japanese stock market than in the American stock market. And then there was the whole business where he got the Mainichi to fire Omori: so far as I know he has never gone out and acknowledged the fact that Omori was writing the truth. He even went on Japanese television as ambassador and called Omori totally irresponsible.

Bergamini’s book raised many, issues, not least — retrospectively — the reaction of the British regime and public to the Em­peror’s recent visit. The main component of British hostility to the Emperor was, beyond doubt, imperialist racism. Criticism of the Japanese was almost wholly restricted to criticism of Japan’s treatment of the European (and American) colonialists in Asia. The Japanese certainly did commit atrocities: approximately 90 per cent of these, including the greatest, the Rape of Nanking, were against the peoples of Asia, not against Europeans. Nanking was a name not much heard in ex-PoW laments. Even the main item evoked, British suffering on the Thai-Burma railroad, was rarely filled out: European deaths here accounted for barely 20 per cent of the total

Other complaints seemed to be more about defeats, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, still rankling since, as Churchill foresaw, Britain failed to win actual victories against the Japanese, except for marginal advances in Burma right at the end of the war. Any critique of the Emperor’s role, and of Japan’s conduct of the war demands: an objective assignment of Japan’s role in Asia; a non­racist criticism of Japanese atro­cities; a political judgement on Japan’s fight against Western colonialism; and a condemnation both of Britain’s colonalist role in Asia (as everywhere), and of Britain’s own atrocities against the peoples of Asia. If this were done, then it would be relevant to demonstrate against Hirohito in England.*Japans Imperial Conspiracy Heinemann, 1971, £4.50.

The Japanese emperor's recent visit to Europe reminded many of the Second World War and of his role in it. But some who saw him tottering down the plane steps and stooping to plant a tree in Kew gardens found it hard to see in this frail figure the criminal he is.

His visit, however, coincided with the publication in America of a huge study, David Bergamini’s Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, which documents the emperor’s role in the Japanese war machine.

Academics in ParoxysmBergamini’s book has sent the

Anglo-American academic estab­lishment into a paroxysm. Richard Storry, a leading British academic expert on Japan, had dubbed Bergamini’s book a “fantasy”, and “an extraordinary Arabian Nights version” of history (The Times, November 15, 1971). In the US, Reischauer, Kennedy’s Ambas­sador to Japan, has launched a full-scale campaign against Bergamini’s book. When we inter­viewed him last week Bergamini said: “What has happened to the book has surprised me . . . It’s not really a book, it’s an international incident”.

Constipated HypocrisyBergamini’s book* is greatly to

be welcomed. It has flushed out a sizeable hunk of constipated hypocrisy in the academic ruling groups in both America and Britain. They have solidly been peddling imperialist versions of Japanese history since 1945, and well before. Reischauer, for example, has managed to maintain the facade of a “liberal”, from his Harvard emplacement; yet as Ambassador in Japan he waged an implacable vendetta and smear campaign against an eminent Japanese news reporter, Omori of the Mainichi, who had first pub­licized the effect of American bombing raids on civilian targets in North Vietnam. Now Reischauer and Storry have come running to protect something even nearer home: the good name of the Japanese ruling class.

Bergamini has stood the con­ventional approach on its head. With a wealth o f detail, drawn from recently-published diaries of key participants (which apparent­ly have not yet been read or digested by some of his critics, including Storry), and from numerous interviews, he has argued that the Emperor was at. the centre of power. He clearly did know what was going on. His closest relatives were deeply in­volved in almost every political and military move, including major atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking — and were rewarded for their actions by him. He manipulated the advice to be presented to himself so that he could appear simply to be ac­quiescing to the plans o f others. He makes out an excellent case, which is inherently more plausible than that presented by the exon- erators. Those who claim the Emperor was not responsible have now to make out their case.

David Bergamini, author of Japan's Imperial Conspiracy. Born in Japan, he was imprisoned in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation. In the 1930s

US Whitewash of HirohitoBergamini also shows how

General MacArthur, head of the US occupation forces in Japan after the war, chose of preserve Hirohito in power and assist in the falsification of history. The reason for this was the US concern to stabilise Japanese capitalism. Bergamini quotes extracts from the testimony of wartime premier Tojo in which, under persuasion, he retracts information that im­plicates the Emperor. Although he does not use these terms, the upshot o f Bergamini’s information is that the Americans engaged in a scapegoating job, by lynching a few vassals o f the Emperor (parti­cularly those implicated in atrocities against westerners), while deliberately leaving the royal core intact. This is certainly correct, and needs saying force­fully.

Bergamini’s book must be re­commended for its many insights. Quite apart from the in­terpretations of the recurrent army “incidents’, it throws new light on such events as the huge undeclared war between Japan and the Soviet Union in 1939 at Nomonhan in Mongolia, into which the Japanese poured over 100,000 men. It re-examines the well-known case o f Richard Sorge and upgrades his role from that o f master spy to political inter­mediary between Moscow and Tokyo.

It is particularly valuable on a much-neglected aspect of Japanese

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7 Days 8th December 1971

RHODESIA: The Man that Home refused to see Gemini

Now he has to look over his left shoulder. Jacob Malik, Soviet Ambassador at the UN, attacks China’s criticism of the Soviet Union as a great power. The Soviet response to Chinese charges has been swift: an article in the December 4 issue of Soviet Weekly, by Nicolai Borodin, attacks the “nonsensical ‘two super-powers’ propaganda from China”. “The Maoist chiefs who have been dishing up this concept recognize no classes, no different social systems, no socialist or capitalist nations. They only recognize ‘super-powers’ and small ‘exploited countries’ — the theory of ‘cities and villages’ on a world scale. They really deserve the Congressional Medal of Honour for this classless concept”, Borodin argues.

In his account of the Rhodesia deal Home claimed that expul­sions under the country's racist Land Tenure Act would cease — until the deal itself had been finalised. Petty though this concession may be, it has come too late for one tribe, the 300-family Tangwena.

Their leader, Chief Rekayi, was refused a meeting by Sir Alec during his Salisbury visit. Rekayi’s frequent letters to the Queen appealing against the attacks on his tribe have received brushoffs from the Foreign Office. The fate of his 300-family tribe is an index of what the future holds.

Gaeresi RanchThe Tangwena used to live on the

banks of the Gaeresi river in the eastern highlands. It had well-watered land and rivers with fish. When the whites came it was declared “white land”. But the area was owned by absentee landowners, and the Tangwena continued to live in the area, baptised “Gaeresi ranch”.

The Rhodesian Front came to power in 1962. They decided to drive the Tangwena out. Renamed “squatters”, the tribe found that the government refused to recognise Rekayi, the new chief they elected in 1965. Despite two successful appeals to the High Court in Salisbury under the old law, the Tangwena were helpless against the new Land Tenure Act introduced in 1969. They were the first victims: after six months notice to quit their land, police moved into Gaeresi, burning Tangwena homes and seizing their cattle.

Rain, Hyenas, LeopardsThis was in September 1970, at the

start of that planting season. They have no crops this year, and will have none next. For over a year now they have been on the run, chased by Rhodesian police. A nearby farm, Nyafaru, has

Chief Rekayi of the Tangwena: leopards, destroyed the livelihood of his tribe.

been prosecuted for giving them shelter. Nyafaru school has been shut for teaching Tangwena children.

The torrential rain has drowned their flocks of goats. The hyenas and leopards have eaten their chickens. Rekayi is leading his people in this wandering existence, and has refused government offers of “a big house”, a salary and a car in return for co-operation in the proposed resettlement. Only eight of the 300 families moved to new lands: four have now returned.

The Tangwena need money to pay for educating their children. Send it to Christian Aid, 2 Amen Court, London EC4.

CHINA: Canton Suspects the US by Jonathan UngerCanton — Just about everyone in Canton seems to have heard on the radio or read in the papers that China won its seat in the United Nations. They are pleased but not enthusiastic about it. One young official said privately that the UN was only facing up to reality after excluding his country - unjustly, he said - for the past 22 years. He added that now that China is in, it will do all it can to fulfill its duties in the spirit of peacefuI coexistence.

Several factory workers exclaimed that China “will never behave like a super-power” in the UN.

The feeling here seems to be that the UN vote provided a victory for China mainly because it proved once and for all that the old US-supported policy of isolating China from world affairs is bankrupt. This is proven, most people added, by the Chinese people’s many foreign friends.

A number of people interviewed were quick to express appreciation for the UN votes of friendship.

The Chinese press front-paged the lists of countries which voted with China on both the UN motions, neglecting to specify which nations voted against the People’s Republic - except for Japan and the US.

The Cantonese man-in-the-street dislikes the US government and its foreign policies intensely,but seems to feel openly cordial toward the American people.

Time and time again, people here asked this reporter to tell the Americans that the Chinese support both present and future friendship between the two

Camera Press

Anti-Communist slogans in New York's Chinatown.

peoples.A manager at the Penhsi textile

factory on the outskirts of Canton stated, for example, that one of the bad consequences of the two decades of US policy against China has been its effect upon the “naturally friendly relations between the American and Chinese peoples.”

As President Nixon moves cautiously to revise the official US stance, China quietly is responding in kind.

In the wake of the UN vote some of the colourful signs denouncing “US imperialism” came down from the halls of the ‘ giant autumn Canton export trade fair. A diplomat coming from Peking also reports that the city’s

Anti-Imperialist Hospital a couple of months ago was renamed Friendship Hospital.

Every Chinese interviewed here agrees with the government’s invitation to President Nixon.

“It’s good. Nixon will see for himself what the Chinese people under the leadership of Chairman Mao have achieved,” a worker at a small enamel factory told this reporter.

When asked what will be discussed, many people reply, Vietnam and Taiwan.

They add that China will never negotiate away any part of its present stand on either: Peking will unswervingly give wholehearted support

to the Vietnamese revolution to the very end; and Taiwan is and always will be China’s own territory.

Even after 22 years of Taiwan’s isolation from the mainland, the vehemence in their words reveal that people in Canton continue to feel very strongly about this point.

Two young workers in an office separately indicated they are perturbed that, as part of the “one China — one Taiwan” tack, “Japanese and US imperialism” may now back the weak Taiwan Independence Movement.

It was intimated such a ploy is not at all the way to win Chinese hearts.

Despatch News Service

hyenas and the Rhodesian police have

RUSSIA:US Business Flocks to Moscow

This year 500 US businessmen have visited Moscow — more than in all the post-war years put together. It signifies a real change. Only last spring the US govern­ment blocked Henry Ford from building what would have been the world's largest truck plant near Moscow. They said some of the trucks might end up in the hands of the North Vietnamese.

The Russians want more trade with the west, and the US sees a growth in Russian trade as one more way of hurrying the detente they know the Russians want. US officials have even been floating rumours that the Russians will make concessions in the SALT disarmament talks to get more US technology.

US Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans was in Moscow late in November to discuss trade expansion. At the moment the US with total trade at $190 million is running sixth behind Russia’s major capitalist trading partners Japan, the UK, Germany, Italy and France. Stans wildly claimed that annual trade could leap up to $5,000 million. He felt that “a watershed has been created in relations with the Soviet Union”.

Already this year US firms have been licensed to sell $136 million,in grain to the USSR, and a fortnight ago IBM sold a $1 million computer to the Russians. Soviet officials have also publicly raised the idea of joint Soviet-US development of Russia’s offshore oil and copper deposits. The US has a clear economic interest in this opening. Last year the US had deficits on trade in consumer goods ($4.8 billion) and in industrial supplies ($.2.2 billion). It managed to get an overall surplus through its-$10.5 billion surplus in high technology items — computers, aircraft and communica­tions equipment. Soviet and east European needs could easily fit what the US needs to export.

Stans’ visit and his exuberant predic­tions clearly had another aim: Nixon is slated to visit Moscow in May, and the trade talks fit his plans for a general detente with the USSR.

They fit Russian plans as well.

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f o r e i g n

FOREIGN7 Days 8th December 1971

G E R M A N Y : Communists N e e d Platform Tickets"Our party is a political force in this country that can no longer be ignored". This may be an exaggeration, but in the three years since it was allowed to operate legally the German Communist Party (DKP) has built up a membership of 33,410.

It is the strongest organised force to the left of the ruling SPD. Recently it held its First Congress in Dusseldorf with 781 delegates, 533 of them workers, representing the membership.

Hideous DefeatIt was a staid affair, and a far cry

from the militant traditions the DKP claims to continue. In the 1920s the KPD was the largest Communist Party in the world, a source of many of the most original ideas in Marxist thought. But, in the 1930s, it went down to a hideous defeat. Its militants were murdered, imprisoned or driven into precarious exile in the Soviet Union.

In the post-war period, the party was broken into two major parts. In the eastern zone, later the German Democratic Republic, the KPD and the SPD merged in December 1946 to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany(SED), but its dependence on Russia, and series of economic and political blunders provided no pole of attraction for communists in the west. The June 1953 workers’ uprising in Leipzig and Berlin was the final blow.

Banned in The WestIn the west the KPD continued a

minimal activity, but was unable to rebuild its pre-fascist bases. In 1956 it was banned by the Constitutional

Court. It continued an underground life, but failed to get the Court’s decision reversed. In 1968 they decided to found a new party, and the old membership of the KPD joined the new DKP.

Old Communists, New ApprenticesThe core of the DKP are the old

communists, but it has won students who demand tighter organisation than the rest of the German left has been able to provide. And it has recruited from the 20,000-strong Socialist German Apprentices (SDAJ).

The Party has organised rent strikes, occupations of private beaches, and solidarity actions for Angela Davis and Vietnam. But Party President Bachmann emphasised: “The factories are the most important terrain for our party”. The DKP has set up over a thousand factory branches, produces 326 factory papers.

No Criticism of The EastThe basis of the DKP’s politics is

unswerving loyalty to the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union. A faction who opposed the invasion of Czechoslovakia were thrown out soon after the DKP was founded. The Party has crushed tendencies that favour China. As with many Communist Parties the DKP is trying to ally with the left wing of the Social Democrats. The Party welcomes Brandt’s eastern policy, but criticises the domestic policy which they argue favours big capital. However, the SPD want to have nothing to do with the DKP.

Platform TicketsThe Party is also scarred by an

extreme craving for respectability. Over fifty years ago Lenin mocked at a group of German militants for refusing to

Henri Bureau / GammaShouting “Haut die Bossen auf die Flossen ” (Hit the bosses on their paws) German, Italian and Greek workers have picketted factories in Baden- Wurttemburg, in a strike that has brought out 550,000 workers. Note the placards in three different languages, which highlights the vast amount of immigrant labour in West Germany. Mediation attempts last week were unsuccessful.

leave the station platform because there was no ticket collector to hand their tickets to. This time DKP Vice-President Mies appealed to his followers waiting to greet a visitor at Dusseldorf station: “Comrades, on the road to revolution one still needs a platform ticket”. He was re-elected vice-president by an overwhelming majority.

GREECE: Communist Leaders for TrialOn the night o f October 18, the day after US Vice-President Spiro Agnew arrived in Greece for a much-publicised dictatorship- bolstering visit 33 members o f the Greek Communist Party (Interior) were arrested in Athens. Among them were Charalambos Drak- opoulos, secretary of the Central Committee, and Dimitrios Partsalidis, a Central Committee member who has been an impor­tant cadre in the KKE (CPG) almost since its inception.

The militants are to be tried at an unspecified date for “attempting to overthrow the established social order”; the trial is to take place in an Athens criminal court, not before a military tribunal. Thirteen of those arrested have been released on bail. The two leaders are not among them.

Militant since 1924Partsalidis joined the CP when he was

twenty years old and was elected to the Central Committee in 1932 at the age of 28. He joined the Political Bureau the next year. During the Second World War he became General Secretary of EAM, the powerful Communist-led resistance organisation which rose to a position of great influence in Greece and came within an ace of seizing power after the liberation.

Its defeat between the war’s end and 1950 is a long and extremely complex

story, but two factors are of overwhelm­ing importance. One is the Churchill- Stalin deal on the Balkans, concluded in Moscow in October 1944, in which Stalin in effect traded Greece for Bulgaria and Rumania; this deprived the Greek left of crucial political and military support. The other was the mistrust which always existed between the KKE leadership and the peasant masses who comprised the bulk of EAM’s armed wing ELAS. Throughout this period Partsalidis stayed loyal to the KKE’s “orthodox” line and played a major part in maintaining it. He lost an eye when attacked by rightist soldiers in January 1946 in the Macedonian town of Veiria.Disagreements in Exile

When the KKE was driven into exile in 1950 Partsalidis’ attempts at criticis­ing its errors resulted in his expulsion as a “right opportunist”. He was reinstated after the CPSU 20th Party Congress in 1956, when the KKE was “de-Stalin- ised” from the outside. Although Partsalidis was the most logical candi­date for KKE General Secretary, the Soviet Union favoured someone more docile, and the job went to Koliyannis. Operating from Rumania, in the early sixties Koliyannis set up a “Bureau of the Interior” under Drakopoulos’ leadership to represent the KKE within the caretaker organisation EDA (Unified Left Party), which had been functioning in Greece since 1950. In about 1966 the KKE began to withdraw from EDA

following a series of disagreements between EDA and the Soviet Union over Cyprus and other matters, and the Bureau of the Interior was ordered to re-establish the KKE’s clandestine organisations, which had been dis­mantled when EDA was founded. As a result of these manoeuvres the Greek left was splintered once again, and separated from its centrist allies at a time when the extreme right was prepar­ing its come back.

National TendencyAfter the colonels’ coup in April

1967 Koliyannis began to attack Partsalidis for “factionalism” and in February 1968 expelled him from the KKE for the second time. Partsalidis fought back and formed a “Unitary Central Committee” in solidarity with the Bureau of the Interior. His group seized the Party’s radio transmitter and made broadcasts to Greece. In the autumn of 1968 they decided to follow the leadership of the Bureau of the Interior, which became the KKE (Interior). The Soviet Union and most other fraternal Parties have refused to recognise it, and Koliyannis is still in Eastern Europe heading the “orthodox” KKE.

Early in 1969 Partsalidis followed a plan he had been considering for some time and, returning secretly to Greece with 18 comrades, placed himself at the disposal of Drakopoulos. He was then 65 years old. Both of them now await trial.

YUGOSLAVIA: Croats want Tourist ProfitsTito made a bitter attack last week on the leaders of the Croatian communist party, accusing them of "lack of vigilance, levity and rotten liberalism". The occasion for this attack was a strike by up to 30,000 students in the Croatian capital, Zagreb.

The students went on strike on November 23. The vice president of the student federation said they wanted “to force the federal bureaucracy to solve at long last the question of foreign ex­change”. The students argued that foreign exchange earned from tourism and exports from Croatia was being taken by the central banks in Belgrade.

Although the foreign exchange issue was their specific cause for complaint, the students’ action was aimed in general at the “federal bureaucracy in Belgrade”.

Croatia has a long history of separa­tism. During the war the Nazis set up a separate Croatian state, and organised a Croatian fascist outfit, Ustasha. (Resur­rection), which has continued an under­ground terrorist existence ever since. In the past two years there has been a revival of Croatian nationalism tinged with fascist nostalgia, Catholic ideology, and anti-communism. Students in Zagreb have recently demanded a separate Croatian seat in the UN, the formation of

a national Croatian army, and the siting of the Yugoslav navy’s HQ in Split.

The local party publicly criticise these tendencies, but there are signs that local forty boss Miko Tripalo has welcomed the student demands as strengthening his bargaining with the centre.

Earlier this year the official party candidates were defeated in the student union elections, and a Croatian Catholic nationalist Yvan Cicak was elected vice­rector of the university. Tripalo then supported these elements, allegedly to control them.

As in previous Yugoslav student strikes the authorities have fought to isolate the students from the local working class. Cicak said that “this is not our private battle but a battle of the entire working class .. . because this plunder of Croatia must stop”.

Four days before the strike began two members of the Croatian Trade Union Federation had been expelled for claim­ing Croatia was in a colonial position. One of them, Jure Saric, was accused of having tried to organise strikes. He said the method of his explusion from the Union was “Stalinist” and “resembled a trial chaired by Vyshinksy”.

Some factories did send messages of support. Others condemned the action. But the local authorities clearly got the benefit they wanted by keeping the protest within the university. On December 3 the students called their strike off, after officials had warned that “dangerous” elements had got control of the movement. Other Yugoslavs reckon that Tito and the leadership have brought these nationalist forces to the fore by agreeing to the decentralisation measures in the first place.

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