JAPAN: Dead & Alive

Communist leaders have a way of disappearing from sight and then, when the rumors of their death are beginning to fill the world press, of turning up alive and kicking. Last week in Tokyo, the pattern was reversed: a Communist leader whom everybody counted alive was acknowledged to have died almost two years ago.

Kyiuchi Tokuda, the boundlessly energetic revolutionary who fled Japan one step ahead of General MacArthur's military police in 1950, was still recognized by Japanese Communists as the party's secretary-general and only inspired leader, though he was resident in Peking and revealed his august self only through secret directives and an occasional propaganda article. Alas, last week, in a dingy little hall in Tokyo, a Communist spokesman was forced by events to tell the truth. Tokuda was dead. He had died in Peking way back in October 1953. Under the new Moscow order of things, the spokesman went on, Tokuda will not be replaced by a new No. 1, but by a "collective leadership."