Politicians' Words and Lack of Persuasive Power: A Critique of Sasaki Sarazo's Speeches (Early 1970s)

Politicians' Words and Lack of Persuasive Power: A Critique of Sasaki Sarazo's Speeches (Early 1970s)

In the early 1970s, Japanese politics was riddled with various contradictions in the aftermath of rapid economic growth. While the one-party system dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) continued, anti-establishment voices swirled in society against the backdrop of pollution problems and the Vietnam War, and the Japan Socialist Party, the leading opposition party, was unable to develop an effective opposition axis despite the expectations of the people and remained stuck in an inward-looking theoretical struggle. In this context, the speeches of Sasaki Sarazo, a leading figure in the Socialist Party, were often viewed coldly by critics and cultural figures.

Sasaki was a leading theoretician of the postwar left, and in his speeches he pushed intelligence and logic to the fore. However, he had a habit of abruptly interjecting side letters into his speech, which he used as proof that he was "modern" and "intellectual. To the audience, however, this sounded rather empty and frivolous, and he was ridiculed as "not at all persuasive. Shuji Terayama, a cultural critic, and others pointed out that words are powerless without social power and practical support, rather than meaning itself, and dismissed Sasaki's words as mere rhetoric.

At the time, Japanese society was inundated with horizontal characters and katakana words. Yokojis were used in advertisements, buzzwords, corporate slogans, and all sorts of other situations as tools to produce a "modern" or "intellectual" image. However, they were often without substance, lightening the language and deepening its disconnect from reality. Politicians' heavy use of yoko-ji was an extension of such social trends.

The ridicule of Sasaki Sarazo was not merely a criticism of an individual, but a reflection of the pathology of postwar Japanese politics as a whole. In other words, the language of politicians has become formalized and remains an ideological game, unable to connect to the realities of people's lives and the contradictions in society. For the people, the language of politics has lost its persuasive power and has become a factor that amplifies their distrust of the existing political system.

This criticism symbolizes the emptiness of the political culture of the early 1970s and highlights the problem that without substantive power and experience behind the words, political discourse is merely an echo.