Sanzō Nosaka

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Sanzō Nosaka
House of Councilors
In office
July 8, 1956 – July 3, 1977
ConstituencyTokyo district
Honorary Chairman of the Japanese Communist Party
In office
1982–1992
Personal details
Born(1892-03-30)March 30, 1892
Hagi, Yamaguchi, Japan
DiedNovember 14, 1993(1993-11-14) (aged 101)
Tokyo, Japan
Political partyJCP (1922–1992)
SpouseRyu Nosaka
Alma materKeio University (BA)

Sanzō Nosaka (野坂 参三, Nosaka Sanzō, March 30, 1892 – November 14, 1993) was a Japanese writer, editor, labor organizer, communist agent, politician, and university professor and the founder of the

communist. Nosaka was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but his activity within British communist circles led to him being deported from Britain in 1921.[1]

After leaving Britain, Nosaka traveled through the

Comintern. He traveled to the West Coast of the United States, where he worked as a spy from 1934 to 1938.[3]

After leaving the United States, Nosaka worked in China from 1940 to 1945, supporting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by encouraging and recruiting captured Japanese soldiers to support and fight for the Chinese communists against the Imperial Japanese Army, and coordinating a spy network that operated throughout Japanese-occupied China. After the surrender of Japan in 1945, Nosaka returned to Japan with hundreds of other Japanese communists, where he led the Japanese Communist Party during the occupation of Japan.[4]

Nosaka attempted to brand the JCP as a "lovable" populist party supporting Japan's peaceful transition to socialism, but his strategy was criticized within the party and within the Soviet Union.[5] During the Korean War the JCP temporarily endorsed violence, and Nosaka disappeared from public life and went underground.[6] He re-emerged to lead the JCP again in 1955, after which he attempted to disrupt the US-Japan Security Treaty by organizing public demonstrations, but he generally supported the JCP's role as a peaceful party.[7] In 1958 Nosaka became Chairman of the JCP, a position he held until retirement at the age of 90, after which he was declared Honorary Chairman. Nosaka joined the faculty of Keio University, and he was widely idolized among left-wing intellectuals until shortly before his death, when the fall of the Soviet Union exposed controversial aspects of his relationship with Stalin's Communist regime.[8]

Biography

Early life

Sanzō Nosaka was the son of a prosperous Japanese merchant and was raised in a

Bunji Suzuki, "Yuaikai" ("The Friendly Society"). To research his thesis, Nosaka contacted Yuaikai's head office, and acquainted himself with its senior leaders: Suzuki initially mistook Nosaka for a salesman the first time they met, but eventually grew fond of Nosaka. When Nosaka graduated from Keio, in 1915, he joined Yuaikai and worked for the organization as a research staff member and as an editor of the organization's journal, Rodo Oyobi Sangyo (Labour and Industry).[9]

Nosaka became interested in communism after the 1917

Bolshevik Revolution.[10] As a greater volume of leftist literature entered Japan from the West, Nosaka's political orientation moved farther from the center. The first Western texts on revolutionary social theory available in Japan were mostly on anarchism, but Nosaka also enjoyed Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward. In 1918-1919 Nosaka read an English copy of The Communist Manifesto brought to Japan by his friend, Shinzo Koizumi. After reading The Communist Manifesto, Nosaka embraced the theories of Marxism.[1]

Nosaka announced his intentions to go abroad to study social theory in the November 1918 issue of Rodo Oyobi Sangyo. He sailed out of

purged.[8] Nosaka wrote A Brief Review of the Labour Movement in Japan. It was published by the International Council of Trade and Industrial Unions in 1921[12]

After attending the Far Eastern People's Conference in the Soviet Union, Nosaka returned to Japan in 1922,[2] and helped found the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) that same year.[11] Nosaka was more secretive about his relationship with the Communist Party than he had been in Britain, and kept his membership a secret from Bunji Suzuki and other moderate labour leaders.[2] After his return, Nosaka worked as a trade unionist and editor of the JCP's official newspaper, Musansha Shimbun.[6]

Because of his activities within the Communist Party (which was illegal in Japan),

May 15 Incident.[10] After his second arrest in 1929, Nosaka spent two years in jail. He was released in 1931 on the grounds of illness.[3] The short lengths of Nosaka's arrests aroused suspicion among other Japanese communists that Nosaka had given important information to the Japanese secret police, but these suspicions were never acted upon.[8]

Comintern agent

Upon his release, Nosaka secretly returned to the Soviet Union, arriving in

Comintern.[6] While in Moscow Nosaka helped to draft the "1932 Thesis", which became the guiding document of the JCP until 1946. Most of his colleagues active in the JCP, who were not able to go abroad, were subsequently arrested by the kempeitai by the fall of 1932.[15][16]

One of Nosaka's friends was Kenzo Yamamoto, a legendary Japanese communist who had been in the Soviet Union with his common-law wife, Matsu, since 1928.

Kenpeitai. On Stalin's orders, both Yamamoto and Matsu were arrested as spies. A firing squad executed Yamamoto, and Matsu died in a gulag. Both Yamamoto and his wife were formally rehabilitated after their deaths by Nikita Khrushchev on May 23, 1956, recognizing the lack of any evidence that the two were actually spies.[8] In his autobiography, Nosaka later wrote that he had tried to save Yamamoto's life.[11]

In 1934, Nosaka secretly traveled to the

Imperial Japanese government. Nosaka's activities included disseminating information to communists still active in Japan, infiltrating and making contact with the Japanese communities active in the United States, and establishing a number of communist front organizations in Seattle, Los Angeles, and other cities on the West Coast. Nosaka worked to gain funding from the Comintern for his activities, and attempted to have other Japanese Communists secretly relocated to America. He planned to recruit American and Japanese agents to send to Yokohama to establish a cell that would operate as a communist front organization. Because the records from this period are incomplete, historians cannot be certain to what extent Nosaka's efforts in America were successful. Nosaka worked as a Comintern agent in America until 1938, when he returned to Moscow. In 1940, the Comintern ordered Nosaka to aid communist forces in China.[3]

In May 1943, Nosaka was the representative of the JCP in the case of the dissolution of the Comintern.[17]

Activities in China

Zhou Enlai and Sanzō Nosaka (left) in Yan'an.
Nosaka (middle) and Mao Zedong (right) at the Seventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party

From March 1940 to the end of 1945, during the

Pingjin Campaign, in which most of the artillery fielded by the Communists was manned by Japanese gunners. In general, the method of "re-education" devised and employed by Nosaka was highly effective.[18]

Initially, the Red Army was a purely

guerrilla force without the facilities to imprison POWs. The policy of the Eighth Route Army, the main communist force active during World War II, was to interrogate prisoners and then release them. After reports surfaced that the Japanese were punishing Japanese prisoners after they returned, the Red Army's policy gradually changed to one of retraining POWs, and the communists began to implement this policy after Nosaka arrived in Yan'an.[19] By the time of its war with China, the Japanese army was educating its officers and common soldiers to die rather than surrender. Injured soldiers were easily captured, and made up the bulk of Japanese POWs. Captured Japanese believed that they would be killed, but were instead fed and clothed, and began to develop a rapport with their captors.[19]

Besides Nosaka's regimen of psychological indoctrination, there were several reasons that Japanese POWs chose to join the Chinese communists. Communist guerrillas took care to develop an early rapport with their prisoners by treating them well. Captured Japanese soldiers were generally moved when they learned of the terrible conditions the war inflicted on the Chinese people, a perspective that they had not been exposed to before their capture. Closer to the end of the war, the growing possibility of defeat created anxiety among the Japanese army. Because of the Japanese military's policy to never surrender, Japanese soldiers never received any training about how to act as POWs: upon returning to Japanese ranks, many would face disgrace, punishment, and starvation. Many Japanese soldiers committed suicide after their capture, but those who chose to live generally came to sympathize with the Chinese. The Japanese army was aware of the existence of Nosaka's Communist Japanese soldiers, and feared the phenomena out of proportion to their actual threat.[19] Koji Ariyoshi, an American who met Nosaka in Yan'an wrote that Nosaka was "the Japanese national who undoubtedly contributed the most in the war against Japanese militarism". The Japanese army attempted to use numerous spies and assassins in order to eliminate Nosaka (who used the name "Okano Susumu" for the duration of the war), but were unsuccessful. Nosaka maintained a network of agents throughout Japanese-occupied China, which he used to gather information about events within the Japanese Empire and about the war.[20]

From 1940 to 1943, Nosaka's presence in China was kept a secret. Under a Chinese name, Lin Zhe, he directed the work of the Research Office of the Japanese Problem. His work with the Research Office in Yan'an brought Yan'an's intelligence information about Japan up to date. Nosaka collected newspapers and other publications from Japan.[21] To research the enemy, Nosaka and his crew took care to analyze current events in Japan and China, which they did by stocking Japanese newspapers, magazines, journals, and diaries that were purchased or seized on the battlefield.[22]

Nosaka's Japanese "prisoner converts" fought freely for the Chinese communists once their re-education was complete. In Yan'an, the Japanese lived normal lives without guards, owned a cooperative store, and printed their own news bulletins and propaganda. Visiting American officers used Nosaka's Japanese soldiers to critique and improve their own methods of anti-Japanese psychological warfare.[23] Shortly after Japan's surrender in 1945, Nosaka began to march with approximately 200 other Japanese Communists across northern China. They arrived at the coast after picking up hundreds of other Japanese along the way. Demanding immediate repatriation from the first Americans they found, they declared their intention to return and work "for the democratization of Japan and the establishment of peace in the Far East". Although there are no records of the exact number of Japanese "re-educated" by Nosaka who elected to remain in Communist-occupied China after 1945, it is estimated that "the number must have been considerable".[24]

Nosaka's contributions to the eventual victory of the Red Army were not forgotten by the leaders he had worked with in China. In 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of Japan's defeat, Nosaka was publicly praised by name by the highest-ranking general in China at the time, Lin Biao.[25]

Postwar

Japanese political career

Sanzō Nosaka speaking to large crowd in Tokyo (ca. 1946)

After the World War II, Nosaka's return to Japan was facilitated by

Japanese Emperor, but to replace Emperor Hirohito with Crown Prince Akihito if the Communists ever gained control of Japan.[8]

Nosaka returned to Japan in January 1946, and received a hero's welcome by the JCP.

Diet, and the party received 4% of the popular vote.[28] Thereafter, the JCP made further progress infiltrating Japanese labor associations and socialist parties, and in the general elections of 1949
, the JCP gained 10% of the popular vote.

However, with the fall of China in 1949 and increasing Cold War tensions around the world, the United States initiated the so-called "Reverse Course" in Occupation policy, shifting away from demilitarization and democratization to remilitarization, suppressing leftists, and strengthening Japan's conservative elements in support of U.S. Cold War objectives in Asia.[30] At the Occupation's urging, the Japanese state and private corporations carried out a sweeping "Red Purge", firing tens of thousands of communists and suspected communists from their jobs in both government and the private sector.[31]

In January 1950, in response to the Occupation-backed Red Purge and at the behest of Stalin, the Soviet-led

mountain village guerrilla units" (sanson kōsakutai).[5]
As punishment for his advocacy of the "lovable" image, Nosaka was temporarily driven out of the party and forced to go underground.

After Nosaka went underground, the U.S.

Japanese Diet.[33] The JCP spent the next three years gradually backing down from the militant line, finally renouncing it fully in 1955, which paved the way for Nosaka's return to power.[33] Nosaka re-emerged in Japan in 1955 as the First Secretary of the JCP. Nosaka was briefly arrested after he resurfaced, but quickly released.[34]

In 1958, Nosaka became the chairman of the JCP's Central Committee. He played a part in organizing the

Dwight Eisenhower, to cancel a visit to Japan, and forced the Japanese Premier, Nobusuke Kishi, to resign, but failed to achieve their main goal of preventing passage of the revised Security Treaty, which Kishi ruthlessly rammed through the Diet in spite of the popular opposition.[36] In Japanese public opinion, the demonstrations were received as a national embarrassment, and the JCP received only 3% of the popular vote in the 1960 elections.[37]

The Anpo protests outraged and energized the Japanese right wing.[38] On October 12, during a televised election debate, Inejirō Asanuma, the chairman of the Japanese Socialist Party, was assassinated by a 17-year-old right-wing youth, Otoya Yamaguchi, who rushed onto the stage and fatally stabbed him twice in the stomach with a wakizashi.[39] After his arrest, Yamaguchi told police that he had hoped to assassinate Nosaka as well.[40] On November 13, 1963, Nosaka survived an assassination attempt while making a speech in Osaka.[41] The perpetrator was 22-year-old Masahiro Nakao, a member of the rightist group Dai Nippon Gokuku Dan. Nakao, armed with a dagger, leaped on a platform where Nosaka was giving his speech. Nakao was subdued by Party members who turned him over to the police.[42]

Nosaka attempted to keep the JCP neutral during the

Sino-Soviet Split of the 1960s, though the CIA interpreted that Nosaka's party remained somewhat more friendly with the Chinese.[43] On Nosaka's seventieth birthday party in 1962, Nosaka received extravagant praise from Beijing. Deng Xiaoping praised Nosaka as an "outstanding fighter of the Japanese people and comrade-in-arms of the Chinese people". The Soviets sent Nosaka a matter-of-fact confirmation of his status within the JCP, and within a month sent the JCP another letter scolding the Party for not adequately supporting Soviet positions.[44] The Soviets' measured praise of Nosaka was consistent with earlier Cominform criticism of Nosaka's political theories, which advocated a peaceful transition into communism.[10]

After his re-entry into public life in 1955, Nosaka was elected to the House of Councillors, a post that he held until 1977.[10] Nosaka joined the faculty of Keio University, and was one of many prominent communist intellectuals active in Japanese academic institutions in his time. Nosaka remained the JCP's chairman from 1958 to 1982, when he stepped down at the age of 90 and took the role of "Honorary Chairman".[8]

Scandal

On September 27, 1992, two Journalists working for the magazine

Shukan Bunshun, Akira Kato and Shun'ichi Kobayashi, publicly revealed evidence of Nosaka's involvement in the deaths of Kenzo Yamamoto and his wife. On a trip to Moscow, Kobayashi and Kato had managed to purchase a number of KGB documents, which had been kept secret since the Stalinist era. Among these documents was the letter that Nosaka had written in 1939 denouncing Yamamoto and his wife.[8]

The revelations of Nosaka's involvement in Yamamoto's death shocked the JCP, already reduced to six seats in the

Diet after the 1991 elections. Akahata ("Red Flag"), a prominent communist newspaper, sent a team of journalists to Moscow to investigate the allegations, and they confirmed the authenticity of the documents.[8]

After the allegations against Nosaka became widely known, he checked himself into Yoyogi Hospital in Tokyo (a common tactic of Japanese politicians facing scandal). When a team of investigators sent by the JCP visited him,[8] Nosaka confessed that the letter was his, but refused to discuss the matter further.[45] The JCP ordered Nosaka to be present for a general Party meeting on December 27, 1992. After some deliberation, the party that Nosaka helped found expelled him by unanimous vote.[8] The Party newspaper[11] reported that Nosaka, when asked if he had any reply to the charges against him, would only state: "I have nothing to say".[8]

One year after being expelled from the Japanese Communist Party, Sanzō Nosaka died in his home of old age. Outside the JCP, Nosaka was remembered for his gentle demeanor, good manners, and conservative sense of style, "just like a British gentleman".[8] He was 101 years old.[46]

Legacy

The Chinese Documentary series "Today In The History Of Anti-Japanese War" dedicated an episode to Sanzō Nosaka.[47]

Sanzō Nosaka was featured in the "International Friends during the Anti-Japanese War". A show organized by the Beijing People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. The show "features 160 pictures of 39 foreign friends who worked together with the Chinese people and made contributions to China's independence and freedom."[48]

Family

Yonago Nosaka was the foster daughter of Sanzō Nosaka. She attended the 60th anniversary of the victory of the War against Fascism. She received a medal as a daughter of Sanzō Nosaka.[49]

Names

Nosaka used the pen names of Okano and Lin Zhe.[49]

See also

Works

  • Sanzo Nosaka (Under the Name "Okano") (1933). Revolutionary Struggle of the Toiling Masses of Japan. Speech By Okano, 13th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Workers Library Publishers.
  • Sanzo Nosaka (1921). A Brief Review of the Labour Movement in Japan. The International Council of Trade and Industrial Unions.

References

Citations

  1. ^ a b Scalapino pp. 4-5
  2. ^ a b c d e Scalapino p. 5
  3. ^ a b c The Japan Times Online
  4. ^ Gillin and Etter pp. 511-512
  5. ^ a b c d e f Kapur 2018, p. 128.
  6. ^ a b c d Universalium 2010.
  7. ^ Taylor pp. iv, 13-14, 19
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Kirkup 1993.
  9. ^ Scalapino p. 4
  10. ^ a b c d e f Encyclopædia Britannica
  11. ^ a b c d e Pace
  12. ^ Sanzo Nosaka (1921). A Brief Review of the Labour Movement in Japan. The International Council of Trade and Industrial Unions.
  13. ^ Scalapino p. 21
  14. ^ Taylor p. 1
  15. ^ a b Scalapino p. 42
  16. ^ Ariyoshi, Beechert, and Beechert p. 124
  17. ^ Milorad M. Drachkovitch (1986). Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern. Hoover Press. pp. 342–343.
  18. ^ Gillin and Etter p. 511
  19. ^ a b c Inoue
  20. ^ Ariyoshi, Beechert, and Beechert pp. 123–125
  21. ^ Page, Xiaoyuan Liu. A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States, and Their Policies for the Postwar Disposition of the Japanese Empire, 1941-1945. pp. 170–173.
  22. ^ Kushner, Barak. The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda. pp. 137, 141–143.
  23. ^ Ariyoshi, Beechert, and Beechert p. 126
  24. ^ Gillin and Etter p. 512
  25. ^ Lin
  26. ^ Miwa and Ramseyer 8-9
  27. ^ Kifner
  28. ^ a b Taylor p. 3
  29. ^ Kapur 2018, pp. 12, 128.
  30. ^ Kapur 2018, p. 9.
  31. ^ Kapur 2018, pp. 9–10.
  32. ^ Taylor p. 28
  33. ^ a b Kapur 2018, p. 129.
  34. ^ Taylor p. 19
  35. ^ Nosaka, Sanzō (May 1960). "Shin Anpo danjite yurusazu". Zen'ei: 4–115.
  36. ^ Kapur 2018, pp. 4–6, 22–24.
  37. ^ Taylor p. iv
  38. ^ Kapur 2018, p. 248.
  39. ^ Kapur 2018, pp. 252–254.
  40. ^ Lucas
  41. ^ Kapur 2018, p. 254.
  42. ^ "PLOT TO KILL RED BALKED". The Spokesman-Review. November 14, 1963.
  43. ^ Taylor pp. 54-61
  44. ^ Taylor p. 75, 79
  45. ^ Associated Press
  46. ^ The Baltimore Sun
  47. ^ 抗战史上的今天 15 野坂参三决定建日本人民解放联盟 (in Chinese). 【抗战史上的今天】官方频道---纪念中国人民抗日战争暨世界反法西斯战争胜利70周年. January 14, 2015.
  48. ^ "Int'l friends photo exhibition unveiled in Beijing". This is Beijing. July 23, 2015.
  49. ^ a b Japan-Anti-fascism War. CCTV.com. August 19, 2015.

Sources Cited

Further reading

  • Kato, Tetsuro (July 2000). "The Japanese Victims of Stalinist Terror in the USSR" (PDF). Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies. 32 (1).
  • Roth, Andrew (1945). Dilemma in Japan. Little, Brown.
  • Gayn, Mark (December 15, 1989). Japan Diary. Tuttle Publishing.
  • Ware Jr, George (October 1, 1983). "Political Change During the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952): The Justin Williams Papers in the East Asia Collection, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland". Journal of East Asian Libraries. 1983 (72).
  • Agnes Smedley (1972). Great Road. NYU Press.
  • Maochun Yu (July 31, 2013). OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War. Naval Institute Press. pp. 168–183.
  • Lynne Joiner (June 2, 2011). Honorable Survivor: Mao's China, McCarthy's America and the Persecution of John S. Service. Naval Institute Press. pp. 74–107.

External links

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