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In 1958, reformers, led by Miyamoto and Sanzo Nosaka, the Communists' grand old man, gained control. Aided by two brilliant brothers, Koichiro Ueda, now the editor of the party paper Akahata, and Tetsuzo Fuwa, now the secretary general, Miyamoto and Nosaka outlined a policy that would stress grassroots issues and make plain party independence from foreign influence. Almost alone among the world's Communists, the Japanese party feuds with both the Russians and the Chinese. Among other matters, Tokyo's Reds have quarreled with Moscow's direction of the international Communist movement and with Peking's refusal to join with the Russians in a common front to help the Indochinese Communists.
The party's attention to the problems of the dissatisfied, unrepresented little man has paid off handsomely. For ten years, the women of a Kyoto suburb fought vainly for a water system that would end their long walks to wells or the polluted Oseki River. Only when the Communists took up their cause did the local government come up with the money. In Tokyo the Communists have fought against high-rise projects that would block sunlight to small householders and have helped to provide a 24-hour, free medical clinic. Even in the countryside, which is still dominated by the Liberal Democrats, the Communists are gaining by resisting big corporations that speculate in land and by fighting the "threat" of farm imports.
Some political analysts believe that the Communists are approaching the peak of their power, and that many people who voted for them last year were simply protesting the business-oriented policies of the Liberal Democratic Party. For the moment, anyway, a Communist majority in Japan seems unthinkable. Earlier this month, in fact, the rival Socialists rebuffed a Communist proposal to start talks for a popular-front coalition. Still, the real question is whether Tanaka's party will take the voters' warning to heart and carry out the social reforms that would make a Communist majority truly impossible.