Word: shiga
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...worst blow to Japanese Communists came from within, when the Cominform publicly blasted Party Strategist Sanzo Nozaka, a Popular Front advocate, for not using more "revolutionary" methods. Japanese Politburo Member Yoshio Shiga accused Nozaka of "Titoism," caused a still unhealed intraparty schism...
Last June General MacArthur ordered Nozaka, Shiga and 22 other Red leaders expelled from political life. They went underground. Leaderless, the party rank & file began to drift away...
...nowhere to be seen or heard was the top purgee, Secretary General Kyuichi Tokuda. Equally elusive were the usually vocal Ritsu Ito, ousted Communist theorist and spokesman, and Yoshio Shiga, leading party advocate of violent action, whose "tough" policy had brought on the MacArthur order. From shrewd, slippery Sanzo Nozaka, pre-purge chairman of the Japanese Politburo, came only ironic speculation. Said Nozaka: "Now that I have so much time on my hands ... I may try to become a movie critic. Or else, now that summer is here, perhaps I can start an ice candy [Japanese Popsicle] shop...
...dispute came to a head at a recent central committee meeting. Shiga warned against Titoist tendencies in the Japanese party leadership. Nozaka and Tokuda, he charged, showed "sectarian" disregard for criticism, ignored "the great role [of the] Cominform . . . and Soviet Union in the forefront of internationally advancing people's power," and stuck dangerously to outmoded notions of a popular front with bourgeois elements. "The time has come, comrades," exhorted Shiga, "to bend our utmost efforts toward the bolshevization of the party." When Nozaka and Tokuda squelched the memo in which Shiga set forth his views, Shiga let it leak...
Akahata, Tokyo's Communist newspaper, denounced the circulation of Shiga's memo as "subversive." At first Shiga declined to make a public retort. "Intraparty affairs," he said, "should be solved within the party." Last week Akahata repeated and amplified its reprimand; it also printed a terse apology from No. 3. Then, within their central committee, the comrades rehashed the issue in hot & heavy argument. The solution: a statement reproving Shiga but leaving him still in his influential post. Japan's lesser comrades looked on, baffled and bewildered by the complex top-level schism...