Japan 2021 Tokyo Metropolitan assembly elections (July) and Lower House Election Oct 31st

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https://twitter.com/Nihonpolitics/status/1410649294307266563

While recognizing the CPC centennial is mostly meaningless virtue signaling, this has got me thinking on the state of the Japanese Left. Stalin did accuse the JCP of upholding Trotsky more than the CPSU line in the 1930s, and most other socialist groups in Japan dislike the policies of the Soviet Union and CCP throughout the Cold War.

I’m trying to get clarification on what the JCP actually believed in during the 50s and what they believe in now after the Soviet Union doesn’t exist. Allegedly, the JCP leadership got drunk at a strip club in the Shibuya district at the dawn of the dissolution of the USSR. Now, it is widely said that the JCP are a primarily democratically run group of social democrats. Jaichind, can you speak to the truthfulness of these claims?

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At this point, I don’t see LDP holding it together for long no matter if the Olympics are held or not. Covid is still ravaging the country and any claimed economic growth is gone. I expect a center (possibly a bit left) party/alliance around Koike and JRP to eat heavily into the LDP, finally bringing an end to the dominant party system. Maybe JCP gains a little from anger at the Olympics.

Unlike previous tries, the opposition seems to have learned a thing or two from previous failures in the 1990s and early 2010s on how to govern. The economic and wider societal declines are too great too fast for the LDP to manage to get out of the rut, like holding snap elections, as any political move in the short term actually raises the chances of a grenade going off in their hands instead of throwing it.

The grenade will go off, but it will also blast Japan itself and keep the country so broken that I doubt the country can position itself back to being a regional power. Without any political influence and with such a lack of prestige, the country’s elites then can only turn inward and attempt to squeeze gold out of blood from the people and other elites. Like the UK now, the country could get more clamorings from the periphery—Osaka, Okinawa, Hokkaido—while getting hit by increased class tensions not just by the workers being furious, but of the lesser elites stabbing upward. The shopkeeps, salarymen in private and public offices, and the Yakuza will absolutely lose it to degrade even further. With the LDP disintegrating, that will let the Hard Right to fill in the gaps without a strong Left to take the country for the masses.

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it feels as if the turnout has done almost nothing to help the CDP, and might have even been a hinderence.

The LDP going "Communist Communist Communist" looks likeliest as a reason for this if it happens.

The jcp need to rebrand

The current campaign was the most moderate in JCP’s history, and subsequently it was a massive flop.

I think there are two reasons for this major flop; the JCP is led by geriatrics and is subsequently an “old” party and the moderate platform alienated New Left participants who select the JCP as the lesser evil. With little new members coming in due to its leadership being disconnected from the youth, a lot of natural stagnation of its membership is taking place. There is also the alienation of previous New Left activists who see no reason for voting for a party increasingly moderating its stances across the board.

The JCP needs to sack it’s current upper brass and get more young and more female voices to represent the party. They need to signal to the other communist organizations that they are open for them to run together as an open list, and combine collective participation in both street activities and electoral alliances.