Kouzou Sasaki

was a Japanese socialist agitator and politician. The longtime leader of the left wing of the Japan Socialist Party in the postwar period, he served as chairman of party from 1965 to 1967.

Small in stature and possessed of a fiery temper and a thick rural Tōhoku accent, he was a loud-mouthed and charismatic figure nicknamed "Kōzō the Ogre."

Early life Kōzō Sasaki was born the third son of an impoverished farming family in Miyagi prefecture on 25 May 1900. In the Diet, Sasaki was noted for his pro-China and anti-American outlook. Sasaki strenuously opposed Eda's program of "structural reform," which sought to broaden the party's base by pursuing policies that might appeal to white-collar workers and farmers who were outside the JSP's traditional base of the urban working class. As a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist, Sasaki insisted that a true socialist revolution could only be built on a firm base of the urban proletariat. He accused Eda of "status-quo-ism" and "sucking up to monopoly capital."

Finally in 1965, Sasaki succeeded in winning the election as Chairman of the Japan Socialist Party. However, Sasaki had the misfortune of serving as party head at a time when the Clean Government Party and the Japan Communist Party were surging at the polls and eating away at the JSP's urban working-class base. Many in the party viewed the General Election of 1967 as a disastrous defeat. Although the party only lost 4 seats in the Lower House, expectations had been high, and Sasaki's hard-left radicalism was blamed for the poor showing. He was ousted as party chairman in favor of the more moderate Tomomi Narita, although Narita actually fared far worse in future elections.

Well-known as a vocal supporter of People's Republic of China, Sasaki was called upon by the conservative government of Eisaku Satō to assist in negotiations to restore diplomatic relations between Japan and China in 1972, a request which he was pleased to oblige.

Later life and death In the 1976 election, Sasaki lost his own seat in the Diet. Thereafter he retired from politics and became involved in the Japan-Cambodia Friendship Association. In 1978, he attracted criticism by visiting Cambodia and claiming that there had been no massacres whatsoever under the Khmer Rouge and that claims of massacres were merely slanderous American propaganda. He also joined a group advocating for the return of the Kuril Islands to Japan by the Soviet Union.

Sasaki died of heart failure on 24 December 1985.